318 [Assembly 



for the spindles and looms of both Europe and America, and loaded 

 the vessels of commerce with a richer freight than the golden fleece 

 of Jason, or the abundant mines of California. 



A similar career of improvement has in some places attended on 

 manufactures. I have treated them, and shall continue to, as embra- 

 cing all the mechanic arts. A co-labourer, thus, with agriculture, and 

 necessary to give to it implements to work with, and indispensable to 

 furnish all the labour-saving machinery which from time to time so 

 increases the power of man over rude nature, manufactures, in late 

 years, have made still more rapid progress than agriculture, by the 

 greater application to them of the new, as well as miraculous 

 discoveries in science, and by the awakened ingenuity of inventive 

 genius, the world over. Their fruits have almost revolutionized some 

 portions of the globe within two centuries. To be sure, the mariner's 

 needle, gunpowder and printing preceded this era ; but what have we 

 seen since, in the spinning-jenny and power-loom — in stamping calicoes 

 by rollers — in stereotype-plates and power-presses — in the manufacture 

 of iron, no less than in its products of nails and screws, costing less 

 now, by machinery, than did once the raw material — in the working 

 on wood, from the planning machine of Woodworth, to the almost 

 intellectual turning lathe of Blanchard — in the use of gangs of saws, 

 the circular saw and improved water-wheels, and devices for elevating 

 and drying grain, when ground, no less than the remarkable uses of all 

 the novel agencies of steam, electricity and magnetism ! These last 

 were as unknown before, for such practical purposes, as the last planet 

 discovered by Herschel or Mitchel, in the most distant regions of space. 

 Manufactures have thus not only aided agriculture, in the cheaper 

 production of food and means for clothing, beyond the naked fig-leaf, 

 or furred skin, but assisted commerce to transport them by the rail- 

 road and steamboat, so as to accomplish, at a far lower rate, an inter- 

 change among every quarter of the globe, of all the surplus labours 

 of man. Another great gain by this, as well as many other improve- 

 ments in manufactures, is the increased rapidity of its operations. It 

 has made locomotives, that cross states while the wagon formerly was 

 loading. It can make paper while, in days gone by, it was washing 

 the rags. It can print books, while once it was setting the types. It 

 can clothe armies in cottons, during the time it was once engaged in 



