and ever-increasing manufactures and commerce, and thinking
everything good that renders their progress still more rapid, either
by lowering the price at which the articles can be produced, or by
discovering new markets to which they may be sent. If, however, the
question that is so frequently asked of the votaries of the less popular
sciences were put here--"Cui bono?"--it would be found more difficult to
answer than had been imagined. The advantages, even to the few who reap
them, would be seen to be mostly physical, while the wide-spread moral
and intellectual evils resulting from unceasing labour, low wages,
crowded dwellings, and monotonous occupations, to perhaps as large a
number as those who gain any real advantage, might be held to show
a balance of evil so great, as to lead the greatest admirers of our
manufactures and commerce to doubt the advisability of their further
development. It will be said: "We cannot stop it; capital must be
employed; our population must be kept at work; if we hesitate a moment,
other nations now hard pressing us will get ahead, and national ruin
will follow." Some of this is true, some fallacious. It is undoubtedly a
difficult problem which we have to solve; and I am inclined to think it
is this difficulty that makes men conclude that what seems a necessary
and unalterable state of things must be good-that its benefits must be
greater than its evils. This was the feeling of the American advocates
of slavery; they could not see an easy, comfortable way out of it. In
our own case, however, it is to be hoped, that if a fair consideration
of the matter in all its hearings shows that a preponderance of evil
arises from the immensity of our manufactures and commerce-evil which
must go on increasing with their increase-there is enough both of
political wisdom and true philanthropy in Englishmen, to induce them to
turn their superabundant wealth into other channels. The fact that has
led to these remarks is surely a striking one: that in one of the most
remote corners of the earth savages can buy clothing cheaper than the
people of the country where it is made; that the weaver's child should
shiver in the wintry wind, unable to purchase articles attainable by the
wild natives of a tropical climate, where clothing is mere ornament or
luxury, should make us pause ere we regard with unmixed admiration the
system which has led to such a result, and cause us to look with some
suspicion on the furt