p.227 The great French wars, like a more recent cataclysm, had left behind them an aftermath of economic dislocation. Falling prices, high taxation, recurrent financial crises, and widespread unemployment were among the fruits of victory in 1815 as in 1918. The workings of the Industrial Revolution which, at the time, aggravated the resultant distress, rendered untlimate recovery certain; but when that recovery first became clearly manifest, in the 1830s, capital and enterprise found their most profitable employment in the development of the country's internal resources, in the building and equipment of factories and the construction of railways, rather than in shipping and foreign trade.