PANORAMA OF MANCHESTER. 541 



It thus appears that there is a darkling idea in existence, that 

 mechanism and steam power will displace human labour ; but it is 

 strenuously insisted upon that the labourers are to be the better for 

 being deprived of the means of support. This is a curious problem 

 in political economy, and we candidly confess that we do not under- 

 stand it. 



In opposition to it, we as strenuously maintain that the labourers 

 will suffer, and that too to a deplorable extent, from the rapidity with 

 which mechanism is superseding them. The time is not very remote 

 when wages will fall so low from the amount of production, and from 

 its cheapness, that the maximum will fall short of supplying the wants 

 of the labourer. If this assertion does not harmonize with the dog- 

 mas of political economy, it has, at least, one merit, which is, that it 

 harmonizes with common sense and with truth. But we will not con- 

 fine ourselves to a mere assertion we will, and that at no distant 

 day, satisfy our readers, by means of facts and of dates which can- 

 not be disputed, that we are right ; and that the universal pressure 

 and discontent so widely existing, and imputed to surplus population, 

 arise from machinery. 



From this it may, perhaps, be supposed that we are enemies to 

 machinery that we would check its progress, and that we should 

 rejoice in seeing the distaff and spindle again occupying the place 

 of the mule and the steam-engine ; and the condensed population 

 of our towns again scattered in village-homes. For the sake of the 

 labourers themselves we might, perhaps, wish that it were so j but 

 the wish would be childish. No ; it is to mechanism we owe much 

 that we now enjoy it is to mechanism that we are indebted for 

 a producing power, which is making us the most wealthy and 

 powerful people in modern times ; it is mechanism that places us 

 in advance of all other countries as a manufacturing and commercial 

 state ; and it is to mechanism that our stability in the present scale of 

 nations will be owing. 



Yet the era of mechanism is one that has been, and will be, attended 

 with incalculable suffering. Already our population is leaving its 

 native country in thousands, and a mass of pauperism, poverty, and 

 discontent meets us in whatever direction we look. It is a state of 

 things imperatively demanding the wisest legislative measures j for, 

 if the mischief come upon us unprepared, if no remedial agency be 

 ready when wanted, most assuredly a social war will attend its ulti- 

 mate progress. 



These are considerations which invest the Panorama of Manchester 

 with an interest quite at variance with its intrinsic merits, and which 

 direct the eye of the observer towards it as a focus in which the 

 element of important events are busily at work. * # * 



M.M. No. 107. 4 A 



