[Illustration:  Wigs and wig bag]

[Illustration:  Flax wheel]

%95.  No Manufacturers.%—­For this state of things England was largely to blame.  For one hundred years past every kind of manufacture that could compete with the manufactures of the mother country had been crushed by law.  In order to help her iron makers, she forbade the colonists to set up iron furnaces and slitting mills.  That her cloth manufacturers might flourish, she forbade the colonists to send their woolen goods to any country whatever, or even from one colony to another.  Under this law it was a crime to knit a pair of mittens or a pair of socks and send them from Boston to Providence or from New York to Newark, or from Philadelphia across the Delaware to New Jersey.  In the interest of English hatters the colonists were not allowed to send hats to any foreign country, nor from one colony to another, and a serious effort was made to prevent the manufacture of hats in America.  People in this country were obliged to wear English-made hats.  Taking the country through, every saw, every ax, every hammer, every needle, pin, tack, piece of tape, and a hundred other articles of daily use came from Great Britain.

Every farmhouse, however, was a little factory, and every farmer a jack-of-all-trades.  He and his sons made their own shoes, beat out nails and spikes, hinges, and every sort of ironmongery, and constructed much of the household furniture.  The wife and her daughters manufactured the clothing, from dressing the flax and carding the wool to cutting the cloth; knit the mittens and socks; and during the winter made straw bonnets to sell in the towns in the spring.

Even in such towns as were large enough to support a few artisans, each made, with the help of an apprentice, and perhaps a journeyman, all the articles he sold.

[Illustration:  Hand loom[1]]

%96.  The Cities.%—­If we take a map of our country and run over the great cities of to-day, we find that except along the seacoast hardly one existed, in 1765, even in name.  Detroit was a little French settlement surrounded with a high stockade.  New Orleans existed, and St. Louis had just been founded, but they both belonged to Spain.  Mobile and Pensacola and Natchez and Vincennes consisted of a few huts gathered about old French forts.  There was no city, no town worthy of the name, in the English colonies west of the Alleghany Mountains.  Along the Atlantic coast we find Portsmouth, Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, Williamsburg, Charleston, Savannah, and others of less note.  But the largest of these were mere collections of a few hundred houses ranged along streets, none of which were sewered and few of which were paved or lighted.  The watchman went his rounds at night with rattle and lantern, called out the hours and the state of the weather, and stopped and demanded the name of every person found walking the streets after nine o’clock.  To travel on Sunday was a serious and punishable offense, as it was on any day to smoke in the streets, or run from house to house with hot coals, which in those days, when there were no matches, were often used instead of flint and steel to light fires.