84	ENGLISH   SAGA
attendant miseries, the exports of the country were rising fast.
History had never recorded such an expansion of wealth and
opportunity as came to island Britain in the first half of the
nineteenth century: even the golden Spanish discoveries in the
Americas three centuries before paled beside it/ Exports of un-
manufactured iron soared from under 30,000 tons in 1815 to
five times as much in 1830, ten times in 1840, and nearly twenty
times in 1850. In the first half of the century coal exports were
multiplied fifteen-fold. Between 1839 and 1849 alone the exports
of mixed wool and cotton fabrics from the West Riding expanded
from 2,400,000 to 42,115,000 yards. It was so in almost everything
else.
In that torrent of opportunity nothing seemed to matter but
getting rich. Whoever could do so was honoured: whoever
failed was passed by and trampled under foot. In Merthyr Tydf il,
where an army of iron-workers lived, sleeping sometimes sixteen
in a room, there were no drains, the water supply came from
the open gutters and the filthy streets were unpaved. At the
palace of Cyfarthfa Castle a few miles away stood,, in Mr. and
Mrs. Hammond's significant phrase, "the home and monument
of the man who had started life on the road to London with all
his fortune in his stout arm and his active brain, and had died
worth a million and a half." "Persons in humble life," wrote
the editor of the Mec/ia?iic's Magazine "should be the last—
though, we regret to say, they arc the first—to speak disrespect-
fully of the elevation of individuals of their own class, since in
nine cases out of ten the individual is the architect of his own
good fortune, and the rise of one man by honest means furnishes
a ground of hope to all that they may by a proper exertion of
the powers which Nature has given them be equally successful."^1
It was the model which the early Victorian moralist held out to
his countrymen. Self-help was almost divine.
.«••>.»•
Of all avenues to individual wealth—as well as to misery,
pauperism and degradation—the chief was cotton. In the late
eighteeii-twenties Britain imported annually an average of
100,000 tons of cotton, ten years later of 200,000 tons, and in 1849
of nearly 350,000 tons. Cotton came to represent nearly a third
of the-nation's trade. It seemed to many that the national centre
of gravity must shift from London to Manchester. The railways
^1C, Wilkins, History qfthe Iron, Steel and finflate Trades qf Walts,