INCORPORATIOxNS MANUFACTORIES. 39 



increase, per cent., of the wealth of Massachusetts from 1820 to 1840 was in no 

 county less than 47-23, and the average increase in the whole State during that 

 period 95-31 per cent., while the increase per cent, of population in the same 

 period was 40-97. Our purpose, however, was not to enter on the barren task 

 of gleaning after our enlightened correspondent C, who has left nothing to be 

 gathered in this path ; it was merely to suggest in view of this proposal to estab- 

 lish a tobacco manufactory at Upper Marlboro'. How much more advantage- 

 ous for a State at large, to have capital distributed, where circumstances admit 

 of it, and how much wiser to adopt a policy that will encourage such distribu- 

 tion over a wide surface and through every county, than to have the same 

 amount of money capital and labor concentrated in large institutions and in but 

 few places ! Hence the satisfaction we always experience at learning that a 

 number of factories, on a moderate scale, are springing up in different neigh- 

 borhoods, which promise fair remuneration to the capital embarked in them. 

 This, at a first and superficial view, may appear to conflict with the suggestion 

 of a single central inspection for tobacco ; but it does not in the least. The 

 factory is a place where the people of the country exchange among themselves 

 labor, provisions and money for the fabrics of the factory. The object of inspec* 

 tion is to enable the people — the consumers of Europe, and the people of the 

 United States, the producers — to understand each other as to the value of the 

 commodities to be exchanged with each other. That value must be fixed at the 

 place in which they congregate — which is Baltimore — and no local decision as 

 to quality and value will be of any avail. It will add to the costs and at last 

 be abandoned again, as it has been before. Local inspections answered the pur- 

 pose fifty years ago, before capital and purchasers were congregated in a large 

 town — a congregation which time and necessity will always bring about, with 

 its necessary consequences and public conveniences. The highlands and moun- 

 tain ranges of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, ought to abound 

 in factories — so that the expense of transporting bulky articles, which now pre- 

 cludes their production, should be overcome by condensing them in form and 

 value, by the power of machinery ; nor do we doubt that the thousands of locali- 

 ties that now invite the use of skill and capital in these States would be occupied 

 and speedily come into full play, creating life and activity where silence reigns 

 profound, under more enlightened domestic legislation, and in the absence of that 

 groveling and detestable party spirit in some of them, which, while it ever pro- 

 fesses exclusive love for the people, contaminates and fly-blows every measure 

 projected by enlightened patriotism for the solid and lasting good of the country. 

 And here, again, we hear the croaking voice of the wiseacre, who plumes him- 

 self on being, ;;ar excellence, " a practical man," putting in his caveat : "What," 

 says he, " have Agricultural Journals and agricultural people to do with the 

 laws and policy of the States 1 with incorporations to encourage industry, and to 

 regulate the use of capital ! Tell us only how to plant corn, and fatten hogs, and 

 shear sheep." Ay, truly ! and it is just this indifference to the laws of the land, 

 as they relate to the landed interest, and to education, which has brought about 

 that state of things under which the farmers of many States are themselves, by 

 the classes that live on them, sheared more closely than their own sheep. 



And where, then, says the reader — since you ivill have us undergo the labor 

 of thinking for ourselves— vrhere are we to find a cure for the enactment of laws 

 and the establishment cf a public policy so inimical to the rights and the pros- 

 perity of the plow 1 How are we to eradicate from our public councils that vul- 



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