y one hand, so each
shoe passes through twenty-five hands, who complete from the hide, as
supplied by the currier, a hundred pair of strong and well-finished
shoes per day. All the details are performed by ingenious applications
of the mechanic powers, and all the parts are characterized by
precision, uniformity, and accuracy. As each man performs but one step
in the process, which implies no knowledge of what is done by those
who go before or follow him, so the persons employed are not
shoemakers, but wounded soldiers, who are able to learn their
respective duties in a few hours. The contract at which these shoes
are delivered to government is 6_s._ 6_d._ per pair, being at least
2_s._ less than what was paid previously for an unequal and cobbled
article.

While, however, we admire these triumphs of mechanics, and
congratulate society on the prospect of enjoying more luxuries at less
cost of human labour, it ought not to be forgotten, that the general
good in such cases is productive of great partial evils, against which
a paternal government ought to provide. No race of workmen being
proverbially more industrious than shoemakers, it is altogether
unreasonable, that so large a portion of valuable members of society
should be injured by improvements which have the ultimate effect of
benefitting the whole.

The low price of labour deprives these classes of the power of
accumulating any private fund, on which to subsist while they are
learning new trades; it seems therefore incumbent on governments to
make sufficient provision, from the public stock, for all cases of
distress, which arise out of changes of this kind. If governments were
benevolent, and vigilant in their benevolence, no members of the
community would, under any circumstances, suffer from causes which are
productive, or supposed to be productive, of general benefit. I
qualify the position by the word _supposed_, because, owing to social
monopolies, and to the advantages taken of poverty by the habits of
wealth, the mass of the people are less benefited by the introduction
of machinery than they ought to be. If a population have been drawn or
driven from agriculture to manufactures, and the lands which
maintained in humble independance the ancestors of the manufacturers
are, in consequence, united into single farms, the manufacturers
should not be left without resource, if their trade fails, or their
labour is superseded by machinery. Against the ill effe