the great seats of the cotton manufacture. The people of Lancashire and Normandy had not formerly the means, as we have now, of knowing that cheap production produces increased employment. There were many examples of this principle formerly to be found in arts and manufactures; but the people were badly educated upon such subjects, principally because studious and inquiring men had thought such matters beneath their attention. We live in times more favorable for these researches. The people of Lancashire and Normandy, at the period we mention, being ignorant of what would conduce to their real welfare, put down the machines. In both countries they were a very small portion of the community that attempted such an illegal act. The weavers were interested in getting cotton yarn cheap, so the combination was opposed to their interests; and the spinners were chiefly old women and girls, very few in number, and of little influence. Yet they and their friends, both in England and France, made a violent clamor; and but for the protection of the laws, the manufactories in each country would never have been set up. What was the effect upon the condition of this very population? M. Say, in his "Complete Course of Political Economy," (that is, the science which teaches how the wealth of a people may be best advanced,) states, upon the authority of an English manufacturer of fifty years' experience, that, in ten years after the introduction of the machines, the people employed in the trade, spinners and

weavers, were more than forty times as many as when the spinning was done by hand. It was calculated, in 1825, that the power of twenty thousand horses was employed in the spinning of cotton; and that the power of each horse yielded, with the aid of machinery, as much yarn as one thousand and sixty-six persons could produce by hand. If this calculation be correct, and there is no reason to doubt it, the spinning machinery of Lancashire alone produced, in 1825, as much yarn as would have required twenty-one million three hundred and twenty thousand persons to produce with the distaff and spindle. This immense power, which is nearly equal to the population of the United Kingdom, might be supposed to have superseded human labor altogether in the production of cotton yarn. It did no such thing. It gave a new direction to the labor that was formerly employed at the distaff and spindle; but it increased the quantity of labor altogether employed in the manufacture of cotton, at least a hundred fold. It increased it too where an increase of labor was most desirable. It gave constant, easy, and not unpleasant occupation to women and children. In all the departments of cotton-spinning, and in many of those of weaving by the power-loom, women and children are employed. There are degrees, of course, in the agreeable nature of the employment, particularly as to its being more or less cleanly. But there are extensive apartments in large cotton factories, where great numbers of females are daily engaged in

processes which would not soil the nicest fingers, dressed with the greatest neatness, and clothed in materials (as all women are now clothed) that were set apart for the highest in the land a century ago. And yet there are some who regret that the aged crones no longer sit in the cottage chimney, earning a few pence daily by their rude industry at the wheel!

The creation of employment amongst ourselves by the cheapness of cotton goods produced by machinery, is not to be considered as a mere change from the labor of India to the labor of England. It is a creation of employment, operating just in the same manner as the machinery did for printing books. The Indian, it is true, no longer sends us his calicoes and his colored stuffs; we make them ourselves. But he sends us forty times the amount of raw cotton that he sent when the machinery was first set up. In 1781 we imported five million pounds of cotton wool. In 1828 we imported two hundred and ten million pounds-enough to make twelve hundred and sixty million yards of cloth-which is about two yards apiece for every human being in the world. The workman on the banks of the Ganges, (the great river of India,) is no longer weaving calicoes for us, in his loom of reeds under the shade of a mango tree; but he is gathering for us forty times as much cotton as he gathered before, and making forty times as much indigo for us to color it with. The export of cotton has made such a demand upon the

Indian power of labor, that even the people of Hindostan, adopting European contrivances, have introduced machinery to pack the cotton. Bishop Heber says, that he was frequently interested by seeing, at Bombay, immense bales of cotton lying on the piers, and the ingenious screw, by which an astonishing quantity is pressed into the canvas bags. The Chinese, on the contrary, from the want of these contrivances to press the cotton so close in bags, sell their cotton to us at much less profit; for they pack it so loosely, that it occupies three times the bulk of the Indian cotton, and the freight costs twelve times the price on this account. When the Chinese acquire the knowledge from other nations, which their institutions now shut out, they will know the value of mechanical skill, in preference to unassisted manual labor.

The arguments for the use of machinery, that may be derived from the manufacture of SILK, are precisely the same as those we have exhibited in the manufacture of cotton. The cost of production has been lessened-the employment of the producers has been increased. When the frame-work knitters of silk stockings petitioned Oliver Cromwell for a charter, they said, "the Englishman buys silk of the stranger for twenty marks, and sells him the same again for one hundred pounds." The higher pride of the present day is, that we buy three million and a half pounds of raw silk from the stranger, employ half a million

of our own people in the manufacture of it by the aid of machinery, and sell it to the stranger, and our own people, at a price as low as that of the calico of half a century ago.

The manufactures of WOOLLEN CLOTH, and of LINEN CLOTH, partly carried on with materials produced by ourselves, and partly with wool and flax bought from other nations, have increased, with the use of machinery, in the same way as the cotton manufacture. In both cases, the article produced is diminished in price.

CHAPTER XI.

THE beaver builds his huts with the tools which nature has given him. He gnaws pieces of wood in two with his sharp teeth, so sharp, that the teeth of a similar animal, the Agouti, form the only cutting-tool which some rude nations possess. When the beavers desire to move a large piece of wood, they join in a body to drag it along.

Man has not teeth that will cut wood. But he has reason, which directs him to the choice of much more perfect tools.

Some of the great monuments of antiquity, such as the pyramids of Egypt, are constructed of enormous blocks of stone brought from distant quarries. We have no means of estimating, with any accuracy, the mechanical