for what you may believe may do you good. You, therefore, want this knowledge to be given to you, extensively, quickly, cheaply. It would be out of our power to impart this knowledge at all without machinery: and, therefore, we shall begin by explaining how the machinery, which gives you knowledge of any sort by the means of books, is a vast blessing, when compared with slower methods of multiplying written language; and how, by the aid of this machinery, we can produce a book for your use, without any limit in point of the number of copies, with great rapidity, and at a small price.

It is about 350 years since the art of printing books was invented. Before that time all books were written by the hand. There were many persons employed to copy out books, but they were very dear, although the copiers had small wages. A Bible was sold for thirty pounds in the money of that day, which was equal to a great deal more of our money. Of course, very few people had Bibles or any other books. An ingenious man invented a mode of imitating the written books by cutting the letters on wood, and taking off copies from the wooden blocks by rubbing the sheet on the back; and soon after other clever men thought of casting metal types or letters, which could be arranged in words, and sentences, and pages, and volumes; and then a machine, called a printing-press, upon the principle of a screw, was made to stamp impressions of these types so arranged. There was an end,

then, at once, to the trade of the pen-and-ink copiers; because the copiers in types, who could press off several hundred books while the writers were producing one, drove them out of the morket. A single printer could do the work of at least two hundred writers. At first sight this seems a hardship, for a hundred and ninety-nine people might have been, and probably were, thrown out of their accustomed employment. But what was the consequence in a year or two? Where one written book was sold, a thousand printed books were required. The old books were multiplied in all countries, and new books were composed by men of talent and learning, because they could then find numerous readers. The printing-press did the work more neatly and more correctly than the writer, and it did it infinitely cheaper. What then? The writers of books had to turn their hands to some other trade, it is true; but type-founders, paper-makers, printers, and bookbinders, were set to work, by the new art or machine, to at least a hundred times greater number of persons than the old way of making books employed. If the pen-and-ink copiers could break the printing-presses, and melt down the types that are used in London alone at the present day, twenty thousand people would at least be thrown out of employment to make room for two hundred at the utmost; and what would be even worse than all this misery, books could only be purchased, as before the invention of printing, by the few rich, instead

of being the guides, and comforters, and best friends, of the millions who are now within reach of the benefits and enjoyments which they bestow.

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The cheapness of production is the great point to which we shall call your attention, we give you other examples of the good of machinery. In the case of books produced by the printing-press you have a cheap article, and an increased number of persons engaged in manufacturing that article. In almost all trades the introduction of machines has, sooner or later, the like effects. This we shall show you as we go on, But to make the matter even more clear, we shall direct your notice to the very book you hold in your hand, to complete our illustration of the advantages of machinery to the consumer, that is, to the person who wants and buys the article consumed, as well as to the producer, or the person who manufactures the article produced.

This little book is intended to consist of 216 pages, to be printed, eighteen on a side, upon six sheets of printing paper, called by the makers demy. These six sheets of demy, at the price charged in the shops, would cost fourpence. If the same number of words were written, instead of being printed—that is, if the closeness and regularity of printing were superseded by the looseness and unevenness of writing, they would cover 200 pages, or 50 sheets, of the paper called foolscap, which would cost in the shops three shillings; and you would have a book difficult instead of easy to read,

THE

RESULTS OF MACHINERY.

CHAPTER I.

In the year 1827, a Committee of the House of Commons s was appointed to examine into the subject of emigration—that is, to see whether it was desirable and practicable to remove distressed laborers from the United Kingdom to distant places, where their labor might be profitably employed to themselves and others. The first person examined before that Committee was Joseph Foster, a working weaver, of Glasgow. He told the Committee, that he and many others, who had formed themselves into a society, were in great distress; that numbers of them worked at the hand-loom from eighteen to nineteen hours a-day, and that their earnings, at the utmost, did not amount to more than seven shillings a-week, and that sometimes they were as low as four shillings. That twenty years before that time they could readily earn a pound a-week by the same industry; and that as power-loom weaving had increased, the distress of the hand-weavers also had increased in the same proportion. A power-loom is one worked

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