er. After manufactures arose, and mills and factories gave
employment to thousands of wage earners, fourteen, fifteen, and even
sixteen hours of labor were counted a day. Protests were early made
against this, and demands raised that a working day should be ten hours.
At last, late in the thirties, the ten hours system was adopted in
Baltimore, and in 1840, by order of President Van Buren, was put in
force at the navy yard in Washington and in "all public establishments"
under the Federal government. Thus established, the system spread
slowly, till to-day it exists almost everywhere. Indeed, in many states,
and in all departments of the Federal government, eight hours of work
constitute a day. Thus, by the aid of machinery, not only are articles,
formerly expensive, made so cheaply that poor men can afford to use
them, but the wage earners who operate the machinery can make these
articles so quickly that they to-day earn higher wages for fewer hours
of work than ever before in the history of the world. Not only did wages
increase and the hours of labor grow shorter between 1840 and 1860, but
the field of labor was enormously expanded. In 1810, when the first
census of manufactures in the United States was taken, the value of
goods manufactured was $173,000,000. In 1860 it was ten times as great,
and gave employment to more than 1,000,000 men and women.

%418. Few Manufactures in the Slave States%.--From much of the
benefit produced by this splendid series of inventions and discoveries,
the people of the slave-owning states were shut out. They raised corn,
tobacco, and cotton, and made some sugar; but in them there were very
few mills or manufacturing establishments of any sort. While a great
social and industrial revolution was going on in the free states, the
people in the slave states remained in 1860 what they were in 1800. The
stream of immigrants from Europe passed the slave states by, carrying
their skill, their thrift, their energy, into the Northwest. The
resources of the slave states were boundless, but no free man would go
in to develop them. The soil was fertile, but no free laborer could live
on it and compete with slave labor, on which all agriculture, all
industry, all prosperity, in the South depended. The two sections of the
country at the end of the period 1840-1860 were thus more unlike
than ever.

SUMMARY

1. Between 1830 and 1850 the rush of population into the West continued,
but, instead of mo