162 Political Economy, 
One chief cause of this great moral revolution, for such it 
truly be called, is to be found in the improvement of machinery, 
and the consequent rapid increase of manufactures. The manu- 
facturing system has been carried among us to an extent unheard 
of in any former age or country ; it has enabled us to raise a reve-*^ 
nue which twenty years ago ive ourselves should have thought it 
impossible to support, and it has added even more to the activity of 
the country than to its ostensible wealth ; but in a far greater de- 
gree perhaps, has it diminished its happiness and lessened its se- 
curity.**** 
Sonle of the sciences and many of the arts require large cities 
to foster them ; they thrive there like exotics in a town-conserva- 
tory ; but the virtues and the comforts of inferior life wither away 
in such atmospheres, like florvers transplanted from the field to 
pine at a strect-windovv . The peasant, however much his religious 
education may be neglected, cannot groAV up without receiving 
some of the natural and softening impressions of religion. Sunday 
is to him a day of rest, not of dissipation : the sabbath bells come 
to his ear with a sweet and tranquillizing sound ; and though he 
may be inattentive to the services of the church, and Uninstructed 
in its tenets, still the church and the church-yard are to him sa- 
cred things : there is the font in wdiich he was baptized, the altar 
at which his parents became man and wife, the place where they 
and their fathers before them have listened to the word of God, 
the graves wherein they have been laid to rest in the Lord, ancl 
where he is one day to be laid beside them. Alas for him, who 
cannot comprehend how these things act upon the human heart ! 
The town manufacturer is removed from all these gentle and ge- 
nial influences ; he has no love for his birth-place, or his dwelling- 
place, and cares nothing for the soil in which he strikes no root. 
One source of patriotism is thus destroyed ; for in the multitude, 
patriotism grows out of local attachments. Omne solum fortijm^ 
tria may be said by the exile and the cosmopolite philosopher, but’ 
natale solum is found among the periphrases for fiatria^ and the 
same feeling will be found in the language of every people wh© 
are advanced one degree beyond the savage state. 
The manufacturing poor are also removed from other causes 
which are instrumental to good conduct in the agricultural classes. 
They have necessarily less of that attachment to their employers 
which arises from long connection, and the remembrance of kind 
offices received, and faithful services performed, —-an inheritance 
transmitted from parent to son : and being gathered together ift 
herds from distant parts, they have no family character to support 
in the place to which they have been transplanted. Their employ- 
ments, too, Unlike those of the handicraft and the agriculturist, 
are usually so conducted as to b'e equally pernicious to mind and 
body. The consumption of life in some manufactories, even in 
those which might at first be thought most innocuous, though if 
may be a consolation to those philosophers who are afraid of being 
crowded at the table of nature, v/ould make good men shudder if 
the account coUld be fully laid before them. 
John Hunter predicted that our manufactories would engender 
new varieties of pestilence. New and specific diseases they have 
