surprising, since those whose interests stand opposed to the increase of manufactures on a large scale, have long and vehemently insisted upon its demoralising tendency. A great deal has been said about the sad change this mischievous system has produced among our neighbours of the eastern states-it has been described as a Pandora's box that has filled the land with all sorts of moral plagues. It must be obvious that the subject has been presented to us through a medium somewhat distorted by wrong prejudices, and even the interesting columns of The Friend' may have contributed to strengthen these prejudices by the revival of the somewhat trite sentimentality of Goldsmith and Southey-I allude to an article in the second number. I am, however, as little disposed to call in question the motives of our philanthropists in opposing the manufacturing system, as I am to extenuate or defraud any abuses to which it is liable. That abuses do exist, even in this country, I am well aware, and I would be the last person to discourage any well directed effort to remdy them.

"It is certainly an interesting enquiry, whether, as manufactures have advanced in our country, the general character of the operative classes has deteriorated? Have these occupations had an unfavourable influence upon the intelligence, the morals," or the health, of those engaged in them?

* With reference to this point, we have great satisfaction in adducing the following conclusive testimony :

WATERFORD, R. I. May 23d, 1835. Dear Sir,-In reply to yours of 7th inst. will observe, that many persons can give you better views than I can, respecting the condition of the cotton manufacture business in its various stages and fluctuations, since its establishment in this country, and the effect of the tariff laws upon it. Our business has always been seven eighths woollen, and is now exclusively so. We have a woollen mill, eighty feet by thirty-six, and one, three hundred and fifty feet by fifty, both five stories high; for broadcloth principally.

As regards the effects of manufacturing villages on the morals of the people, there can be but one opinion among those who know any thing about the subject. They certainly tend very powerfully to the improvement of morals. In our village, with a population of three hundred to four hundred, not an intemperate person lives. Nearly one hundred females are in the village, and since its establishment, a term of ten years, not a case of illegitimacy has occurred, nor has a rumour of such a nature ever been in the village. No person who has ever resided in the village, has ever become chargeable to the town in any manner. On the first of April last, the people who work in our mills had $10,000 due to them in cash. excellent free school through the year, of about fifty scholars.

We have an Yours truly, WELCOME FARNUM.

"Having had access to authentic information upon this subject, I answer as follows:-

"The cotton manufacture may now be considered permanently established; it is prosperous and rapidly increasing in the New England states, which must remain, as they are at this time, the principal seat of it. For the present, my remarks will be confined to this branch of manufactures.

"A great change has taken place within the last few years, in regard to the proportion of children employed in these factories; the proprietors having found that their interest is promoted by dispensing almost entirely with the labour of children under fifteen years.

"In the factories at Newmarket, N. H., which have been in operation about four years, there are employed, 250 girls, five boys and twenty overseers and assistants-twelve of the overseers have families. Nine only of the girls are under fifteen years of age, six of whom are fourteen. Three of the boys are under fifteen, two of whom are fourteen. In every instance the children under fifteen reside with their parents or guardians in the village, and are admitted into the factories on account of the peculiar circumstances of the families; they are allowed to work only six months in the year-during the other six months, they attend a public school in the village. Besides the operatives mentioned, there are thirty machinists, twenty of whom have families; these, however, are employed in a separate workshop. The relative number of children employed in this establishment, it is believed, will correspond, without much variation, with the proportion to be found in most of the factories east of Providence and its vicinity; in the latter district, the manufactories were established at an earlier period, and still give employment to a larger proportion of children.

"In cases of newly formed villages, it is found necessary to erect at the commencement several boarding-houses, sufficiently spacious to accommodate a large number of the workpeople in each; to this arrangement there are powerful objections. At Newmarket it has been entirely abandoned, and is superseded by the increased number of private families, which have taken up their residence in the village; and not being inconveniently large, are kept under good regulation. A part of the girls whose parents do not live in the village, are distributed as boarders with those families which are disposed to receive them.

"Nearly all of the manufacturing villages are small, and there is very generally attached to each dwelling a lot of ground, which

is appropriated to the culture of garden vegetables, and food for a cow and swine; these are considered very essential comforts, and are rarely dispensed with by the industrious operatives.

"It should be borne in mind, that in this country water-power is almost exclusively used in manufactures, and, on account of its greater cheapness, the day must be far distant indeed, when steam power will be extensively used; the consequence is, that the manufacturing population must be scattered. We can have no Manchesters on this side the Atlantic, while our thousand rivers and streams afford an inexhaustible supply of unimproved power."

Dr. Ure says:"The present is distinguished from every preceding age by an universal ardour of enterprise in arts and manufactures. Nations, convinced at length, that war is always a losing game, have converted their swords and muskets into factory implements, and now contend with each other in the bloodless, but still formidable, strife of trade. They no longer send troops to fight on distant fields, but fabrics to drive before them those of their old adversaries in arms, and to take possession of a foreign. mart. To impair the resources of a rival at home, by underselling his wares abroad, is the new belligerent system, in pursuance of which every nerve and sinew of the people are put upon the strain." Dr. Ure continues in another place :

"Great Britain may certainly continue to uphold her envied supremacy, sustained by her coal, iron, capital, and skill, if, acting on the Baconian axiom, 'knowledge is power,' she shall dilligently promote moral and professional culture among all ranks of her productive population. Were the principles of the manufactures exactly analysed, and expounded in a simple manner, they would diffuse a steady light to conduct the masters, managers, and operatives, in the straight paths of improvement, and prevent them from pursuing such dangerous phantoms as flit along in the monthly patent-lists. Each department of our useful arts stands in need of a guide-book to facilitate its study, to indicate its imperfections, and to suggest the most probable means of correcting them. It is known that the manufactures of France have derived great advantage from the illustrated systems of instruction published under the auspices of its government and patriotic societies. Manufacture is a word which, in the vicissitude of language, has come to signify the reverse of its intrinsic meaning: for it now denotes every extensive product of art, which is made by machinery, with little or no aid of the human hand; so that the most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour. The philosophy of manufactures is to modify the texture, form, or composition of natural objects by mechanical or chemical forces, acting either separately, combined, or in succession.

"The blessings which physico-mechanical science has bestowed on society, and the means it has still in store for ameliorating the lot of mankind, have been too little dwelt upon; while on the other hand, it has been

accused of lending itself to rich capitalists, as an instrument for harassing the poor, and of exacting from the operative an accelerated rate of work. It has been said, for example, that the steam-engine now drives the powerlooms with such velocity as to urge on their attendant weavers at the same rapid pace. But the truth is, that every member of the loom is so adjusted, that the driving force leaves the attendant little to do, certainly no muscular fatigue to sustain, while it procures for him good, unfailing wages.

"The constant aim and effect of scientific improvement in manufactures are philanthropic; as they tend to relieve the workman, either from niceties of adjustment, which exhaust his mind and fatigue his eyes, or from painful repetition of effort, which distort or wear out his frame. At every step of each manufacturing process, the humanity of science will be manifest.

"The title of factory, in its strictest sense, involves the idea of an operation composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object,—all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.

"In its precise acceptation, the factory system is of recent origin, and may claim England for its birth-place. The mills for throwing silk, or making organzine, which were mounted centuries ago, in several of the Italian states, and transferred to England, by Sir Thomas Lombe, in 1718, contained indeed some elements of a factory, and probably suggested some hints of those grander and more complex combinations of self-acting machines, which were first embodied, half a century later, in the cotton manufacture, by Richard Arkwright, assisted by gentlemen of Derby, well acquainted with its celebrated silk establishment. But the spinning of an entangled flock of fibres into a smooth thread, which constitutes the main operation with cotton, is, in silk, superfluous; being already performed by the unerring instinct of a worm, which leaves to human art the simple task of doubling and twisting its regular filaments. The apparatus requisite for this purpose is more elementary, and calls for few of those gradations of machinery which are needed in the carding, drawing, roving, and spinning processes of a cotton mill. When the first water-frames, for spinning cotton, were erected at Cromford, in the romantic valley of the Derwent, about sixty years ago, mankind were little aware of the mighty revolution which the new system of labour was destined by Providence to achieve, not only in the structure of British society, but in the fortunes of the world at large. Arkwright alone had the sagacity to discern, and the boldness to predict, in glowing language, how vastly productive human industry would become, when no longer proportioned in its results to muscular effort, which is by its nature fitful and capricious, but when made to consist in the task of guiding the work of mechanical fingers and arms, regularly impelled, with great velocity, by some indefatigable physical power. What his judgment so clearly led him to perceive, his energy of will enabled him to realise with such rapidity and success, as would have done honour to the most influential individuals, but were truly wonderful in that obscure and indigent artisan. The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of a proper self-acting mechanism, for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous thread, as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to

renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright. Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organised, and its labour lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands. After struggling for a while to conquer their listless or restive habits, they either renounce the employment spontaneously, or are dismissed on account of inattention. If the factory Briareus could have been created by mechanical genius alone, it should have come into being thirty years sooner; for upwards of ninety years have now elapsed since John Wyatt, of Birmingham, not only invented the series of fluted rollers, (the spinning fingers usually ascribed to Arkwright,) but obtained a patent for the invention, and erected 'a spinning engine without hands,' in his native town.

"The details of this remarkable circumstance, recently snatched from oblivion, are given in Baines's History of the Cotton Manufacture. Wyatt was a man of good education, in a respectable walk of life, much esteemed by his superiors, and therefore favourably placed, in a mechanical point of view, for maturing his admirable scheme. But he was of a gentle and passive spirit; little qualified to cope with the hardships of a new manufacturing enterprise. It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition, to subdue the refractory tempers of workpeople, accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence, and to urge on his multifarious and intricate constructions, in the face of prejudice, passion, and envy. Such was Arkwright, who, suffering nothing to stay or turn aside his progress, arrived gloriously at the goal, and has for ever affixed his name to a great era in the annals of mankind: an era which has laid open unbounded prospects of wealth and comfort to the industrious, however much they may have been, occasionally, clouded by ignorance and folly.

"Prior to this period, manufactures were every where feeble and fluctuating in their development; shooting forth luxuriantly for a season, and again withering almost to the roots, like annual plants. Their perennial growth now began in England, and attracted capital in copious streams to irrigate the rich domains of industry. When this new career commenced, about the year 1770, the annual consumption of cotton, in British manufactures, was under four millions of pounds weight, and that of the whole of Christendom was, probably, not more than ten millions. Last year, 1835, the consumption in Great Britain and Ireland was about two hundred and seventy millions of pounds, and that of Europe and the United States, together, four hundred and eighty millions. This prodigious increase is, without doubt, almost entirely due to the factory system, founded and upreared by the intrepid native of Preston.

"If, then, this system be not merely an inevitable step in the social progression of the world, but the one which gives a commanding station and influence to the people who most resolutely take it, it does not become any man, far less a denizen of England, to vilify the author of a benefaction, which, wisely administered, may become the best temporal gift of Providence to the poor, a blessing destined to mitigate, and, in some measure, to repeal, the primeval curse pronounced on the labour of man, 'in the sweat