I am very well aware, that the Vertots of our time are very like the historian of Rhodes, "when their siege is done."*

The metropolis of a great kingdom, not far distant from France, is traversed by a majestic river, which even ships of war ascend in full sail. Canals intersect the surrounding district in all directions, and transport, at little expense, the heaviest burdens. A complete network of roads, under admirable management, leads to the remotest parts of the kingdom. To these gifts of nature and art, this metropolis, which every one must by this time have named, unites an advantage which the city of Paris does not possess; the quarries of stone for building are not at its gates, and are found only at a distance. Here then is realised the Utopia of the new economists. They will, no doubt, reckon by hundreds of thousands, perhaps by millions, the quarrymen, the boatmen, the carters, the engineers, incessantly employed in quarrying, in transporting, in preparing the rough blocks and hewn stones, required for the construction of the immense number of edifices by which that metropolis is annually enriched. They may reckon as

* It is related of Vertot, that "his mode of composition never had made him sensible of the advantage and necessity of accurate erudition. He looked on history more as a literary work, than any thing else; scrupulous exactness as to facts, was, in his eyes, of less consequence than their dramatic effect; and he was not more particular as to truth of colouring. So that he might well reply to those who offered him some curious documents with regard to the Siege of Rhodes," My Siege is done." See the Biographie Universelle, article VERTOT.-TR.

they please. It happens in the city I speak of, as it would have happened in Paris, if it had been destitute of its productive quarries; stone, being very expensive, is not used; brick is almost everywhere employed in its stead.

Millions of workmen, at the present day, perform prodigious labours on the surface and in the bowels of the earth, which must be altogether abandoned if particular kinds of machinery were to be given up. Two or three instances will be sufficient to make this truth apparent.

The daily removal of the water which rises in the workings of the mines of Cornwall alone, requires a power of fifty thousand horses, or three hundred thousand men. I ask, would not the of three hundred thousand workmen swallow up the whole profits of the working?

wages

Does the question of wages and profits seem too delicate? Other considerations will lead us to the same conclusion.

For the working of one Cornish copper-mine alone, (one of the Consolidated Mines), there is required a steam-engine of a greater power than three hundred horses constantly in harness; and which does, in every period of twenty-four hours, the work of a thousand horses. I am not afraid of contradiction when I affirm, that there is no possible way of getting more than three hundred horses, or from two to three thousand men, to work together and to advantage, on an opening so small as the shaft of a mine. To proscribe the Consolidated Mines' engine would, then, be to throw out

of employment the great number of workmen whose labours it renders possible; it would be to declare that the copper and tin of Cornwall should remain there for ever, buried under a mass of earth, of rocks, and of water, many hundred metres in depth. The theory, when put into this form, will certainly have few defenders; but what matters the form, when the ground-work is evidently the same?

If we were to pass from those labours which require the exertion of immense strength, to the examination of various manufactured articles, which the delicacy of their materials, and the regularity of their forms, have caused to be ranked among the wonders of art, the insufficiency, the inferiority of our organs, compared with the ingenious combinations of mechanism, would strike all minds alike. Where, for instance, is the spinner so skilful, as to be able to draw from a single pound of raw cotton, a thread fifty-three leagues in length, as is done by the machine called a Mule-Jenny?

I am not ignorant of all that certain moralists have asserted as to the inutility of the muslins, the laces, the gauzes, which these delicate threads are employed to make; but let it suffice me to observe, that the most perfect mule-jennies are kept in motion under the continual superintendence of a great number of workers; that the whole question, so far as these are concerned, is how to manufacture saleable articles; that, finally, if luxury be an evil, a vice, nay even a crime, the blame of it ought to be laid on the purchasers, and not on

these poor workmen, whose existence would, I fear, be very precarious, if they were to direct their energies to manufacturing for the use of the ladies only coarse cotton stuffs, in place of fashionable gauze.

But to leave all those minute remarks, and to come at once to the great question itself.

"We must not," said Marcus Aurelius,* " "adopt the opinions of our fathers, like children, simply because they were held by our fathers." This maxim, undoubtedly very true, ought not to prevent us from believing,-from at least presuming,that opinions against which, since the origin of society, no objection has ever been brought, must be conformable to reason and the public good. Well then, on the much disputed question as to the utility of machinery, what was the universal suffrage of antiquity? Its ingenious mythology will inform us founders of empires, eminent lawgivers, subduers of tyrants who oppressed their country, were honoured but with the title of demigods; whereas, the inventor of the spade, the sickle, and the plough, was ranked among the gods themselves.†

I think I already hear our antagonists exclaiming against the extreme simplicity of the instruments I have just mentioned; resolutely refusing

* See M. Aurelius Antoninus De Seipso, IV. lii.—TR.

+ See Lord Bacon, as quoted by Sir James Mackintosh, in his speech at the meeting of subscribers to Mr. Watt's monument in Westminster Abbey. The passage alluded to, occurs at p. 208 of this volume.-TR.

to them the appellation of machines, characterising them only as tools, and strongly intrenching themselves behind this distinction.

I might reply, that a distinction such as this is puerile; that it would be impossible to say precisely where the tool ends, or the machine begins; but it is more important to observe, that in the pleadings against machines, nothing has ever been said of their greater or less complexity. If they are to be abolished, it is because with their assistance one labourer does the work of many; and will any one have the hardihood to maintain, that a knife, a drill, a file, a saw, do not give a marvellous facility of execution to the hand that wields them, or that the hand thus aided cannot do the work of a great number of hands provided only with their nails?

Those workmen stopped not short at the sophistical distinction between a tool and a machine, who, led away by the detestable theories of some of their pretended friends, went through some of the counties in England in 1830, raising the cry of "down, down with machinery!" Rigorous logicians, they broke to pieces in the farms the sickle for reaping, the flail for threshing the corn, and the sieve through which it is winnowed. And what, in reality, are the sickle, the flail, and the sieve, but means of abridging labour? The spade, the pick-axe, the plough, the drill-plough, could find no quarter with that infatuated band; and I only wonder that in their fury they should have spared the horse, a sort of machine of comparatively