seventeenth century, New England manufactured cloth in sufficient quantities to export it to the Southern colonies and to the West Indies.  As the industry developed, mills were erected for the more difficult process of dyeing, weaving, and fulling, but carding and spinning continued to be done in the home.  The Dutch of New Netherland, the Swedes of Delaware, and the Scotch-Irish of the interior “were not one whit behind their Yankee neighbors.”

The importance of this enterprise to British economic life can hardly be overestimated.  For many a century the English had employed their fine woolen cloth as the chief staple in a lucrative foreign trade, and the government had come to look upon it as an object of special interest and protection.  When the colonies were established, both merchants and statesmen naturally expected to maintain a monopoly of increasing value; but before long the Americans, instead of buying cloth, especially of the coarser varieties, were making it to sell.  In the place of customers, here were rivals.  In the place of helpless reliance upon English markets, here was the germ of economic independence.

If British merchants had not discovered it in the ordinary course of trade, observant officers in the provinces would have conveyed the news to them.  Even in the early years of the eighteenth century the royal governor of New York wrote of the industrious Americans to his home government:  “The consequence will be that if they can clothe themselves once, not only comfortably, but handsomely too, without the help of England, they who already are not very fond of submitting to government will soon think of putting in execution designs they have long harboured in their breasts.  This will not seem strange when you consider what sort of people this country is inhabited by.”

=The Iron Industry.=—­Almost equally widespread was the art of iron working—­one of the earliest and most picturesque of colonial industries.  Lynn, Massachusetts, had a forge and skilled artisans within fifteen years after the founding of Boston.  The smelting of iron began at New London and New Haven about 1658; in Litchfield county, Connecticut, a few years later; at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1731; and near by at Lenox some thirty years after that.  New Jersey had iron works at Shrewsbury within ten years after the founding of the colony in 1665.  Iron forges appeared in the valleys of the Delaware and the Susquehanna early in the following century, and iron masters then laid the foundations of fortunes in a region destined to become one of the great iron centers of the world.  Virginia began iron working in the year that saw the introduction of slavery.  Although the industry soon lapsed, it was renewed and flourished in the eighteenth century.  Governor Spotswood was called the “Tubal Cain” of the Old Dominion because he placed the industry on a firm foundation.  Indeed it seems that every colony, except Georgia, had its iron foundry.  Nails, wire, metallic ware, chains, anchors, bar and pig iron were made in large quantities; and Great Britain, by an act in 1750, encouraged the colonists to export rough iron to the British Islands.