Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/957

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YORK—YORKSHIRE

co-educational). The city is situated in a farming and stock raising region, and among its manufactures are foundry products, bricks and flour. York was settled in 1864, was laid out in 1869, was incorporated as a town in 1875 and was chartered as a city in 1877.


YORK, a city and the county scat of York county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., about 100 m. W. of Philadelphia and about 28 m. S.E. of Harrisburg. Pop. (1900) 33,708—1304 being foreign-born and 776 negroes; (1910) 44,750. York is served by the Maryland & Pennsylvania, the Northern Central (Pennsylvania) and the Western Maryland railways. Among the public buildings are the County Court House (1899) and a large Federal Building (1910). York is the seat of the York Collegiate Institute (1873) founded by Samuel Small (d. 1885) and of the York County Academy (1785). The Historical Society of York (1895) has a valuable collection of documents relating to local history. York is the commercial centre for a rich agricultural region, and has manufactures of foundry and machine-shop products, silk goods, &c. The total factory product in 1905 was valued at $14,258,696.

York, the first permanent settlement in the state W. of the Susquehanna, was laid out in 1741 in what was then the Manor of Springettsbury (named in honour of Springett Penn, a grandson of William Penn) by Thomas Cookson, a surveyor for Richard and Thomas Penn, then the proprietors of the colony, and was named after York, England. The first settlers were chiefly Germans from the Rhenish Palatinate, who were Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites and Moravians. English Quakers and Scotch-Irish settled here also. The settlement lay on the Monocacy road, the main line of travel to the S. and S.W., and it grew rapidly, especially between 1748 and 1751. In 1749 the county of York was erected (from Lancaster county) and York was made the county-seat. In 1754 York had 210 houses and 1000 inhabitants. Troops from York took part in the Seven Years' War and the War of American Independence. In the old county court-house (built in 1754—56, pulled down in 1841) the Continental Congress sat from the 30th of September 1777 to the 27th of June 1778, having left Philadelphia on the approach of the British, and having held a day's session at Lancaster. At York the Congress passed the Articles of Confederation (15th of November 1777) and received news of the American victory at Saratoga and of the signing of treaties between the United States and France. The Conway cabal came to an end here, and the arrival here of Baron Steuben and of Lafayette in 1777 helped the American cause. In September 1778, $1,500,000 in silver lent by France to the United States was brought to York; and Benjamin Franklin's press, removed from Philadelphia, issued $10,000,000 of Continental money. Thomas Paine here wrote part of his Fifth Crisis. Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is buried here. In the Civil War, Confederate troops under General John B. Gordon entered York on the 28th of June 1863, and a small Federal force retreated before them; and the battle of Gettysburg was fought about 28 m. E. York was incorporated as a borough in 1787 and was chartered as a city in 1887.

See G. R. Prowell, The City of York, Past and Present (York, 1904), and C. A. Hawkins and H. E. Landis, York and York County (ibid. 1901).


YORKE, CHARLES (1722—1770), English lord chancellor, second son of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, was born in London on the 30th of December 1722, and was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His literary abilities were shown at an early age by his collaboration with his brother Philip in the Athenian Letters. In 1745 he published an able treatise on the law of forfeiture for high treason, in defence of his father's treatment of the Scottish Jacobite peers; and in the following year he was called to the bar. His father being at this time lord chancellor, Yorke obtained a sinecure appointment in the Court of Chancery in 1747, and entered parliament as member for Reigate, a seat which he afterwards exchanged for that for the university of Cambridge. He quickly made his mark in the House of Commons, one of his earliest speeches being in favour of his father's reform of the marriage law. In 1751 he became counsel to the East India Company, and in 1756 he was appointed solicitor-general, a place which he retained in the administration of the elder Pitt, of whose foreign policy he was a powerful defender. He resigned with Pitt in 1761, but in 1762 became attorney-general under Lord Bute. He continued to hold this office when George Grenville became prime minister (April 1763), and advised the government on the question raised by Wilkes's North Briton. Yorke refused to describe the libel as treasonable, while pronouncing it a high misdemeanour. In the following November he resigned office. Resisting Pitt's attempt to draw him into alliance against the ministry he had quitted, Yorke maintained, in a speech that extorted the highest eulogy from Walpole, that parliamentary privilege did not extend to cases of libel; though he agreed with Pitt in condemning the principle of general warrants. Yorke, henceforward a member of the Rockingham party, was elected recorder of Dover in 1764, and in 1765 he again became attorney-general in the Rockingham administration, whose policy he did much to shape. He supported the repeal of the Stamp Act, while urging the simultaneous passing of the Declaratory Act. His most important measure was the constitution which he drew up for the province of Quebec, and which after his resignation of office became the Quebec Act of 1774. On the accession to power of Chatham and Grafton in 1767, Yorke resigned office, and took little part in the debates in parliament during the next four years. In 1770 he was invited by the duke of Grafton, when Camden was dismissed from the chancellorship, to take his seat on the woolsack. He had, however, explicitly pledged himself to Rockingham and his party not to take office with Grafton. The king exerted all his personal influence to overcome Yorke's scruples, warning him finally that the great seal if now refused would never again be within his grasp. Yorke yielded to the king's entreaty, went to his brother's house, where he met the leaders of the Opposition, and feeling at once overwhelmed with shame, fled to his own house, where in three days he was a dead man (January 20, 1770). The patent raising him to the peerage as Baron Morden had been made out, but his last act was to refuse his sanction to the sealing of the document.

Charles Yorke was twice married. His son by his first marriage became earl of Hardwicke; his eldest son by his second marriage, Charles Philip Yorke (1764—1834), member of parliament for Cambridgeshire and afterwards for Liskeard, was secretary of state for war in Addington's ministry in 1801, and was a strong opponent of concession to the Roman Catholics. He made himself exceedingly unpopular u1 1810 by bringing about the exclusion of strangers, including reporters for the press, from the House of Commons under the standing order, which led to the imprisonment of Sir Francis Burdett in the Tower and to riots in London. In the same year Yorke joined Spencer Perceval's government as first lord of the admiralty; he retired from public life in 1818, and died in 1834. Charles Yorke's second son by his second marriage was Sir Joseph Sydney Yorke (1768-1831), an admiral in the navy, whose son succeeded to the earldom of Hardwicke.


YORKSHIRE, a north-eastern county of England, bounded N. by Durham, E. by the North Sea, S.E. by the Humber estuary (separating it from Lincolnshire), S. by Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, S.W. for a short distance by Cheshire, W. by Lancashire and N.W. by Westmorland. It is the largest county in England, having an area of 6066.1 sq. m., and being more than double the size of Lincolnshire, which ranks next to it. In a description of the county it is constantly necessary to refer to its three great divisions, the North Riding, East Riding and West Riding (see Riding, and map of England, Sections I., II.).

The centre of the county is a plain, which in the S., about the head of the Humber, resembles the Fens in character. The hills W. of the central plain, covering nearly the whole of the W. Riding and the N.W. of the N. Riding, are part of the great Pennine Chain (q.v.). These hills consist of high-lying moorland, and are