with this improvement. "Ay," said they, "this saves our labor; we are relieved from the hard work of distributing the ink upon the balls." What the roller did for the individual pressman, the machine, which can only be beneficially applied to rapid and to very heavy printing, does for the great body of pressmen. It removes a certain portion of the drudgery, which degraded the occupation, and rendered it painful and injurious to health. We have seen two pressmen working a daily paper against time; it was always necessary, before the introduction of the machines, to put an immense quantity of bodily energy into the labor of working a newspaper, that it might be published at the proper hour. Time, in this case, was driving the pressmen as fast as the rapid stream drove the boatmen of the Rhone; and the speed with which they worked was killing them as quickly.

If artisans, who have generally the means of acquiring knowledge, were to think as they ought to do upon the benefits to their own particular trade of machines for saving labor, we should never hear of combinations against such machines. A reflecting being feels it a degradation to be employed in unprofitable labor. Some parishes, we understand, set their paupers to turn a grindstone, upon which nothing is ground; and, to their honor be it spoken, the poor people, in many cases, would rather starve than submit to this ignoble occupation. Even the unhappy persons at tread-mills feel additionally degraded when

they turn the wheel without an object; they call it "grinding the wind." Why are these people degraded by such occupations? Why do they consider their labor ignominious? Because their labor has no results. Is it not equally ignominious when men resolve, by suppressing machinery, to do that with a great deal of labor, which would otherwise be done by a very little labor? to bind themselves to the wheel, when the wheel would do the work without them? to labor, in fact, without results from their labor?

We have a remarkable example of the folly of a particular body of men upon this subject now lying before us. We have a paper, dated the 16th of December, 1830, issued by nearly five hundred journeymen bookbinders of London and Westminster, calling upon their employers to give up the use of a machine for beating books. Books, before they are bound in leather, were beat with large hammers upon a stone, to make them solid. in London by a machine.

That work is now done The workman is relieved from the only portion of his employ which was sheer drudgery-from the only portion of his employ which was so laborious, that it rendered him unfit for the more delicate operations of bookbinding, which is altogether an art. The greatest blessing ever conferred upon bookbinders, as a body, was the invention of this machine. Why? It has set at liberty a quantity of mere labor without skill to furnish wages to laborers with skill. The master-bookbinders of Lon

don and Westminster state that they cannot find good workmen in sufficient quantities to do the work which the consumer requires. The good workmen and the bad each were employed in the drudgery of beating, which called into action a certain muscular power of the arm and hand, which unfitted them for the delicacy and rapidity of other operations of bookbinding. The good workmen were therefore lessened by the drudgery of the beating-hammer; but the bad workmen, the mere laborers, whose work a very simple machine can do better, feel that they cannot compete with this machine. Why? They were indolent and dissipated, and the work which they neglected is now done without their aid. The great delay in bookbinding was always occasioned by the delay in beating. It was a mere drudgery which the better men paid others to perform; and these mere drudges, by the neglect of their work, kept the higher orders of bookbinders idle. And yet, in spite of their own experience, all the bookbinders try to put down the beating-machine, which has a tendency, above all other things, to elevate their trade, and to make that an art which in one division of it was a mere labor. If the painter were compelled to grind his own colors, and make his own frames, he would no longer follow an art, but a trade; and he would receive the wages of a laborer instead of the wages of an artist.

CHAPTER XVI.

The objection of the bookbinders to the beatingmachine offers a remarkable example of the inconsistency of all such objections. The bookbinders have a machine called a plough, for cutting the edges of books, which is, probably, as old as the trade itself. A great deal of labor and a great deal of material are saved by this plough. Why do they not require that a book should be cut with a ruler and a pen-knife? They have presses, too, acting with a screw, to make the book solid and flat. A press with an iron screw will do ten times the work of a press with a wooden screw; and one of Bramah's hydraulic presses, which has power enough, if fully exerted, to break a piece of wrought iron three inches thick, will do twenty times the work of the common iron-screw press. Nobody insists that the master-bookbinder shall use the press of the smallest power, that he may be compelled, at the same time, to use the labor of ten men instead of one. The objection would be too absurd upon the face of it. But a press of any kind is an old machine. A machine for beating books is a new machine. Working-men, and other men who ought to know better, have attempted to draw distinctions

between old machines and new machines.

As it is, the inventors of machines generally go before their age; and thus too many of them have either starved or struggled for years with want, because their own generation was not wise enough to value the blessings which science and skill had provided for it. But if the ordinary difficulties of establishing a new invention, however valuable it might prove, were to be increased by the folly which should say, we will have no new machines at all, or at any rate, a machine shall become old before we will use it, there would be an end to invention altogether.

We have before us, "A List of Inventions of the various kinds of Machinery made use of in the manufacture of Hosiery, Lace, &c." The compiler of the List, which is printed at Nottingham, mentions these various kinds of machinery as having been "the means of raising the mechanics of Nottingham to so high a rank amongst the artisans of Great Britain.” This List contains a brief description, with the dates of the invention, and the names of the inventors, of no less than one hundred and one machines, nearly all applied to the manufacture of stockings and lace. Many of these machines are now in use; and some of them are disused; but they are all improvements, or attempted improvements, of some less perfect machines which preceded them. Before the invention of the first stocking-machine, in the year 1589, by William Lea, a clergyman, none but the very rich