advantages of their local separation; the port and the manufactory are divided only by two hours distance in time, while their distance in space affords room for all the various occupations which contribute to the perfection of either. The whole territory of Great Britain and Ireland is more compact, more closely united, more accessible, than was a single county two centuries ago. Men can exchange their commodities at the best market; the seller and the buyer are each free to choose their market. If Ireland sends to Liverpool more cattle than Liverpool can consume, they can go upon the rail-road to Manchester. If Manchester has a cheap stock of cotton cloth which Liverpool does not want for America, the pieces will find their way to the small dealers in the hamlets of Ireland.

And there are some men who say that this wonderful communication, the greatest triumph of modern skill, is not a blessing; for the machinery has put somebody out of employ. Baron Humboldt, a traveller in South America, tells us, that upon a road being made over a part of the great chain of mountains, called the Andes, the government was petitioned against the road, by a body of men who for centuries had gained a living by carrying travellers in baskets strapped upon their backs over the fearful rocks which only these guides could cross. Which was the better course to make the road, and create the thousand employments belonging to freedom of intercourse, for

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these very carriers of travellers, and for all other men; or to leave the mountains without a road, that the poor guides might gain a premium for risking their lives in an unnecessary peril?

CHAPTER VIII.

The people who live in small villages, or in scattered habitations in the country, have certainly not so many direct benefits from machinery as the inhabitants of towns. They have the articles at a cheap rate, which machines produce, but there are not so many machines at work for them as for the inhabitants of towns. From want of knowledge they are unable to perceive the connexion between a cheap coat or a cheap tool, and the machines which make them plentiful, and therefore cheap. But even they, when the saving of labor by a machine is a saving which immediately affects them, are not slow to acknowledge the benefits they derive from that best of economy. The scriptures allude to the painful condition of the "hewers of wood" and the "drawers of water;" and certainly, in a state of society where there are no machines at all, or very rude machines, to cut down a tree and cleave it into logs, or to raise a bucket from a well, are very laborious occupations, the existence of which, to any extent amongst a people, would mark them as remaining in a wretched condition. In our own country, at the present day, there are not many houses, in situations where water is at hand, that have

not the windlass, or what is better, the pump to raise this great necessary of life from the well. Some cottagers, however, have no such machines, and bitterly do they lament the want of them. We once met an old woman in a country district tottering under the weight of a bucket, which she was laboring to carry up a hill. We asked her how she and her family were off in the world. She replied, that she could do pretty well with them, for they could all work, if it were not for one thing-it was one person's labor to fetch water from the spring; but, said she, if we had a pump handy, we should not have much to complain of. This old woman very wisely had no love of labor for its own sake; she saw no advantage in the labor of one of her family being given for the attainment of a good, which she knew might be attained by a very common invention. She wanted a machine to save that labor. Such a machine would have set at liberty a certain quantity of labor which was previously employed unprofitably; in other words, it would have left her or her children more time for more profitable work, and then the family earnings would have been increased.

But there is another point of view in which this machine would have benefited the good woman and her family. Water is not only necessary to drink and to prepare food with, but it is necessary for cleanliness, and cleanliness is necessary for health. If there is a scarcity of water, or if it requires a great

deal of labor to obtain it, (which comes to the same thing as a scarcity,) the uses of water for cleanliness will be wholly, or in part neglected. If the neglect becomes a habit, which it is sure to do, disease, and that of the worst sort, cannot be prevented.

When men gather together in large bodies, and inhabit towns or cities, a plentiful supply of water is the first thing to which they direct their attention. If towns are built in situations where pure water cannot be readily obtained, the inhabitants, and especially the poorer sort, suffer even more misery than results from the want of bread or clothes. In some cities of Spain, for instance, where the people understand very little about machinery, water, at particular periods of the year, is as dear as wine; and the laboring classes are consequently in a most miserable condition. In London, on the contrary, water is so plentiful, that twenty-nine millions of gallons are daily supplied to the inhabitants; which quantity, distributed to about one hundred and twenty-five thousand houses and other buildings, is at the rate of above two hundred gallons every day to each house. To many of the houses this water is, by the aid of machinery, not only delivered to the kitchens and wash-houses on the ground-floors, where it is most wanted, but is sent up to the very tops of the houses, to save even the comparatively little labor of fetching it from the bottom. All this is done at an average cost to each house of about twopence a day; which is a less price than the labor of