ion, and which it is so much the object, both of legislative
enactment and of individual ingenuity, to augment and extend. Yet, is not
the crushing effect of these great discoveries on the welfare of the
labouring classes, as manifest as their elevating influence on the
fortunes of their employers, and the sum total of the produce of national
manufactured industry? On no other principle is it possible to explain the
prodigious accumulation of wealth in one class of the British empire, and
of degradation, misery, crime and destitution in the other, and far more
numerous classes.

The division of labour and the confining of each workman, or workchild, to
one limited sphere of employment, while it is productive of a very great
increase in the skill which each exerts in his own department, and in
consequence augments, in a similar proportion, the net produce of
manufactured industry, is still more fatal to the morals, habits, and
independence of the manufacturing classes. Variety of occupation is
indispensable to vigour of mind or independence of character. The
exclusive chaining of the human mind to one employment, even though that
employment is of the most intellectual kind, as the duties of the lawyer,
the statesman, the physician, or the divine, speedily contracts the
understanding, narrows the interest, circumscribes the field of enjoyment,
and often hardens the heart. If this is the case, as undoubtedly it is,
with those who are exclusively immersed even in the learned professions,
which require an exercise of thought, and can be founded only on a long
and cultivated education, how much more must it be the case with those
whose occupation is purely mechanical, and so trivial that it may be
learned in a few days--as twirling a film, twisting a cotton, dabbing a
plate, or drawing a cloth out of a vat? Such operatives are exposed, at
every period of their lives, to the greatest evils which can debase
humanity--uncertainty of subsistence and monotony of occupation. Their
work is so simple, that any one can learn it in a few days--therefore they
are exposed to competition with the whole labouring classes of the
community;--it is so uniform, that it neither requires, nor is compatible
with, intellectual elevation--therefore it is speedily made, by the effect
of competition for such simple employment, to engross their whole time.
Mental improvement, moral or religious cultivation, are scarcely possible
to any but the stronges