BRITAIN AND THE OTHERS^221
all westerners may have looked alike, but Europeans saw the differ
ences. Visitors exclaimed about the high standard of living of the Eng
lish countryman: brick cottages, tile roofs, woolen clothing, leather
shoes, white bread (one can follow the rising incomes of industrializ
ing Europe by the white bread frontier). They saw women in cotton
prints and wearing hats; servant girls who so resembled their mistresses
that the foreign caller wondered how to address the person answering
the door. They saw poor people, they tell us, but no misérables; no
starved, pinched faces; beggars, but no beggar "without both a shirt,
and shoes and stockings." (The English seem to have been proud of
their beggars, whom they saw as plying a trade.)^12
To the purchasing power of the lower classes, to their ability to buy
beyond the necessities, must be added the wealth—remarkable for its
time—of the great English middle class: the merchants and shop
keepers, manufacturers and bankers, men of law and other profes
sions. Daniel Defoe, best known as a writer of imaginative fiction, also
wrote delicious travel accounts and economic tracts of remarkable per
spicuity. He saw what was happening around him, and when he wrote
of the English consumer, he told us more than any dusty functionary
could:
It is upon these two classes of People, the Manufacturers [not the em
ployers but rather those who labor in industry] and the Shopkeepers, that
I build the hypothesis which I have taken upon me to offer to the Public,
'tis upon the Gain they make either by their Labour, or their Industry in
Trade, and upon their inconceivable Numbers, that the Home Consump
tion of our own Produce, and of the Produce of foreign Nations imported
here is so exceeding great, that our Trade is raised up to such a Prodigy of
Magnitude, as I shall shew it is....... These are the People that carry off the Gross of your Consumption;
'its for these your Markets are kept open late on Saturday Nights; because
they usually receive their Week's Wages late.... Their Numbers are not
Hundreds or Thousands, or Hundreds of Thousands, but Millions; 'tis by
their Multitude, I say, that all the Wheels of Trade are set on Foot, the
Manufacture and the Produce of the Land and Sea, finished, cur'd, and fit
ted for the Markets Abroad; 'tis by the Largeness of their Gettings, that
they are supported, and by the Largeness of their Number the whole
Country is supported; by their Wages they are able to live plentifully, and
it is by their expensive, generous, free way of living, that the Home Con
sumption is rais'd to such a Bulk, as well of our own, as of foreign Pro
duction... ,^13