It is the purpose of this thesis to discuss some phases of this period of preparation, and to show how, in the spheres of agriculture and of industry, the highway had been made straight for the entry of the new methods and organisation that were to create and dominate the new age. An endeavour will he made to show how far the abandonment of the old economic organisation had proceeded, and to what extent the lines of the new had begun to emerge. While special attention is paid throughout to Lancashire, it has not been the intention to confine the scope of discussion to that county* but rather to use it to illustrate the broader sweep of the principles involved. Any description of England is liable to be partial , and thus make generalisations difficult. Industry was expanding in the north, while in the south and west, it tended to decline. The worsted industry of Norfolk and Essex had already begun to move northward into Yorkshire. The cotton industry bin Lancashire was already beginning to cause uneasiness amongst the woollen manufacturers and merchants, lest the new fabrics should spoil their trade. With industry, population was moving northward. While the date 1760 is adopted as roughly marking the limit of the present enquiry, it stands rather as a landmark than as a goal post. In the woollen industry particularly, it is possible to take facts from a later period without invalidating the main contention of the thesis. There will he an attempt to show how the new movements, which were to dominate the modern, economic world were already groping through to the light. During the first half of the eighteenth century. the systems and organisation of a former age were passing away, and when the new order gained, entrance, it found the "room more or less swept and garnished. There were still many survivals of the former system, but the great landmarks, which had so strongly characterized the Tudor and Stuart regimes were gone, and their places were waiting to be filled by the ideas and institutions of a new world.