ined about one pound of sugar for each head of the
population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the
Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our
factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They
employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377,
against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the
product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress
of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred
and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or
twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an
endless list.

Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They
exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of
all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years
from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people
rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively
high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our
ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long
time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They
have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of
late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for
instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have
usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers
take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but
they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters
of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part
of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily
explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic,
in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate
powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and
the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that
employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing
of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for
our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and
gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European
states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and
multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have
long