no durable connexion either with
the land, or even with the capitalist who employs them. Employed at weekly
wages, they are constantly on the verge of famine if turned out of their
employment. Every thing now is concentrated in huge mills, manufacturing
districts, and great towns, where the labour of men is too often
supplanted by women, that of women by children, that of children almost
entirely by machinery, on which they attend. The cost of production,
indeed, is prodigiously diminished, by the substitute of these feeble or
tiny labourers for that of full-grown men; and with it the profits of the
masters, and the circle of the export sale, are proportionally augmented;
but at what expense is this profit to a few gained? At the expense, in
some degree, at least, it is to be feared, of the independence, the
comfort, the morals, the lives, of whole classes of the labouring portions
of the community.

The application of knowledge to the arts, of science to manufactures, so
far from diminishing, has, hitherto at least, had the most ruinous
possible effect in increasing this fatal tendency of great capital and
extensive manufactured industry upon mankind. Watt, Arkwright,
Crompton--those giants of intellectual power, whose discoveries have
augmented tenfold, often an hundredfold, the productive powers of
manufacturing labour--have been the worst enemies that the happiness and
morals of the working manufacturers ever knew. For what is it that, by
means of great capital, working with the powers which their immortal
discoveries have conferred, manufacturing industry has become? Why, it has
all, or nearly all, run into huge mills, or other establishments, in which
machinery, at a cost of thirty, forty, or fifty thousand pounds, is
erected, and a crown of needy women and children are employed, in
ordinary times, at the lowest wages which can support existence, with a
few men at a guinea or twenty-five shillings a-week, to direct and
superintend their labours. It need not be told what the habits of such a
crowd of young women, most of them from fourteen to twenty, must in
general be. These evils in manufacturing districts are universally felt
and complained of; but it is not equally generally admitted, that they
arise invariably, and, as matters at present stand, inevitably, from that
very extension of science and mechanical power to the arts, which is, in
the view of the increase of national wealth, so just a subject of
exultat