1831.] Englandat the Close of 1831. 589 



duce. The man of estate expended that additional rent, and more, in 

 the general rise of all commodities, and in his own increase of living ; 

 and nothing resulted to either party but more labour and more in- 

 cumbrance. 



The sudden influx of wealth by manufactures within the last forty 

 years has still more changed the aspect of England, the English cha- 

 racter, and the English government. Immense fortunes were, un- 

 doubtedly, made by manufactures. Though we may be at a loss to know 

 the national good derived from any one of those spinning-jenny accu- 

 mulations, if we except the rather delicious one of giving £20,000 

 a-year to Sir Robert Peel — that they spread vast sums of money 

 through England is equally undoubted ; that, while the war lasted, 

 the German smuggler was able to sell cottons and cambrics to the 

 noblesse of liis country at two-pence a yard lower than the lowest of the 

 native fahricants ; and that the American dealer imported socks and 

 stockings into New York at a price which astonished the New Yorkers, 

 is equally true. But this was only while the war lasted ; even then, 

 high wages were not high profits — the workman was often in want, and 

 every fluctuation of the war, or even every change of popular taste, was 

 like a stroke of death to their trade. The mere change from buckles to 

 shoe-strings threw tens of thousands out of bread. The next change, 

 from metal buttons to silk, cast out its ten thousands, too. Thus, upon 

 every trivial occasion, the welfare of vast multitudes of human beings 

 has been put in peril. 



But a still heavier national evil consists in the quantity of severe 

 labour required to make manufactures profitable any longer. Even 

 during the wai", competition in England itself compelled the manu- 

 facturers to urge their workmen to efforts beyond the health, or even 

 the life, of the ordinary human frame. The sickly hue of the artificer is 

 proverbial, and what but distortion can be expected from the infant, 

 which, instead of playing about the fields, or enjoying itself rather than 

 employing itself in the simple occupations of the cottage, is fixed to a 

 machine at five years old ; and gets all its perceptions of air, exercise, and 

 understanding, from the atmosphere of dye-tubs and steam-boilers, 

 from being tied to a spinning-jenny for life, and from twisting cotton- 

 thread for fourteen hours a day. 



We may talk of the Negro broiling in the cane-plantations of Ja- 

 maica, or the Indian shivering in the American mines ; but infancy is 

 not there put to the torture, nor disease inflicted on a creature almost 

 before he has words to pronounce his complaints. Let any man look 

 over the report on the employment of the artificers in the cotton facto- 

 ries, and, if he have a human feeling, he will exempt the idolaters of old 

 from being the solitary worshippers of Moloch. The difference is, that 

 we contrive to worship Moloch and Mammon at the same time. 



But here comes the aggravation. Tlie system of severe labour and 

 distortion to infancy, of slavish and unwholesome toil to the mature, 

 and of cheerless and unceasing effort to the decaying and the aged, is 

 now neccxsart) — it cannot be remitted, if we would retain the market of 

 Europe ; it must even be made severer still if we should expect to live 

 by manufactures — for all Europe is making head against us, our work- 

 men, and our produce. British machinery is British no longer. The 

 steam-engine, the spiiming-jenny, and the thousand other wonderful 

 efll'orts of our native ingenuity — and we give them credit ibr being little 

 short of miracles in their simj)licity, and their power, and their per- 

 formance — are now gone through all nations. They drudge in the 



