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ART. VII.-The Manufacturing System, and the Remedy of some of its Evils that affect the Operative. (Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for the Half-year ending 31st October, 1845, printed 1846.)

OF the manufacturing system we are, it must be owned, no great admirers. It is a system which has unquestionably tended to enrich this country, but we greatly doubt whether it has contributed much to its wealth; for wealth and riches are by no means synonymous words, as they are too generally considered: they are two essentially different things, and in the confounding of them lies, as it appears to us, one of the fundamental errors of the day. Any scheme by which the riches of a nation are increased is regarded as adding to its wealth; and this apart from all consideration of the influence which such schemes may exert on the happiness and character, physical, intellectual, and moral, of its people; or of the peculiar bearing they may have on national institutions. Nor is it possible that so vital an error should ever remain a merely speculative one: we see its legitimate result in the undue importance that has of late been assigned to that branch of the national industry chiefly concerned in manufactures, and our trade in them with foreign countries; and which, by those concerned in it and, in some degree, by the Legislature also, has been treated as though it were the one interest to which, in this country, all others must be subordinated. We willingly concede to it the full value in its proper place; but we deem that it has been thrust into a position which it has no claims to occupy; and that hence arise the many and sore evils which have flowed from it: evils that have now attained such a height as to render interference with them difficult-their removal, we fear, impossible. We must pay, and are paying, the full penalty for having neg lected a good old rule of a somewhat undervalued science: had we not forgotten "first" to "define our terms," we should not now be found assuming (and acting on the ruinous assumption) that money, and welfare, are convertible ones. This idea, we are afraid, extends more or less throughout our whole body politic ; but has certainly found its principal and most destructive exponent in that interest which now demands the sacrifice of all others that may in any degree stand in the way of a full indulgence of its insatiable appetite for gain.

Southey's prophetic eye, in the earlier days of this system, foresaw its inevitable tendency; and he predicted its result with an accuracy which subsequent events have but painfully verified.

His voice was then raised in tones of, alas! unheeded warning. Would that it had fallen in all the energy of truth on every ear that was beginning to listen, entranced, to the fascination of the tempter; whispering, as he displayed his glittering gifts, "all these things will I give thee, if"-let the enormities of the first workings of the system, and the selfish policy of its more mature age, declare the terms on which the fatal boon was to be conferred! Nor should it have fallen on the ear alone: we would that it had sunk into the mind and heart of all those who possessed souls capable of understanding and appreciating something wiser and better than a mere pounds-shillings-and-penceview of all things under the sun of all who were capable of believing that man was created for a higher, nobler, purpose than that of doubling his capital. Then might we not have had to regret and contend with such a state of things as now demands our serious attention, and awakens no small degree of alarm.

We say that we view the manufacturing system with regret; but we cannot there leave it. Something further is required from us; for, however we may shut our eyes to the fact, it cannot be denied that it has taken firm hold on this country as a nation: more so than we deem to be for the national weal. Nor must it be forgotten that the tendency-indeed an avowed purpose of recent legislative enactments is to give it still further development at the expense, if not otherwise attainable, of better interests. Not that the manufacturer wishes to destroy the agriculturist: we are far from either saying or thinking that: it is simply a matter of indifference to him; he will not go out of his way to do it, nor will he step aside to avoid it, should the latter chance to stand in the way of the onward progress of the commercial free-trader: Juggernaut's car may or may not crush him, but he must just look to that himself. Indeed, the sang froid manifested by some of the leading leaguers as to what is to become of their neighbours is, to do them justice, inimitable: while, we must further add, that the position in which they have placed themselves and those classes whose interests are not identified with theirs is, after all, but a fitting sequence (not to say consequence) of those numerous and vital changes that have of late years been thrust upon us, with or without the national consent; either has appeared indifferent to the dominant party, which but too plainly evidences that some of us at least "think our fathers fools." Nor do we for a moment doubt that our "wiser sons," with heavy hearts and brains perplexed to remedy our headlong and headstrong blunders, will return us the compliment in good earnest,

The present state of affairs in this country is certainly a remarkable and somewhat anomalous one. Enormous and rapidly accumulated wealth on the one hand, and equally enormous poverty on the other, would seem unmistakeably to indicate that something was wrong in our system; if, indeed, it be not altogether a vicious one that operates thus partially for the benefit of the few, and not of the many. The riches of the country have been increasing, but there has not been a corresponding improvement in the condition of the poor. It is high time to search out where the fault lies. That much of the existing poverty may be traced to reckless profligacy on the part of the labouring population of large towns we are quite prepared to concede: we fully admit their general improvidence -would that they were better taught and we have been made painfully aware that even high wages (amounting in some instances to as much as a clerk in a merchant's office often receives, and on which he and his family have to keep up a respectable appearance) do not ensure those ordinary and plain comforts of the working man's household which, where conduct and management are found, are enjoyed on more moderate earnings. But heaven forbid that we should thus libel the working classes at large, or do otherwise than attribute a just share of the blame of this miserable, unchristian, state of things to that unholy appetite for gain (the agriculturist is not guiltless here) which has been stimulated, if not entirely caused, by our over-commercial tendency, and which has led men to grind down the wages of those they employ to their minimum-whether ostensibly, or by long-delayed payments, or the "truck-system," or by that mode which modern rapacity has found out and which deceives alike the public and its victim, till secure in the clutches of unrighteous power. The enquirer, in some parts of the manufacturing districts, may be told that certain wages-good ones, it may be-are given; but he is not told of the mulets and fines (which it is impossible to avoid) that cut down the ostensible wage to dimensions far more agreeable to the pocket of the em ployer than that of the poor deluded operative; and one way of accomplishing which is to give out work-silk-weaving, for instance, which the weaver is bound, under penalty of the forfeiture of a certain sum for every day by which it is exceeded, to complete within an assigned time: the time being one in which it is not possible to finish the work; so that a deduction from the wages offered is inevitable. A plan so offensive in its character that we name it here, alike to expose its shamelessness, and to warn those who may enquire into these things that, when informed what the master gives, they must not

take for granted they therefore know what the workman gets. How great a gulf must practices of this kind fix between the employer and the employed! But men who cheat their servants will cheat each other when they can, and of this an illustration occurs to us which is, perhaps, worth repeating. A gentleman engaged in commercial affairs informed us that he had some years ago found himself compelled to decline any further business transactions with an eminent firm, in one of our large manufacturing towns, in consequence of their invariably making a deduction from his account for short weight, even when, suspecting the trick, he had himself personally superintended the weighing of the goods to be sent in to them, in order to convince himself that it was accurately done. Still there was the usual deduction, whereupon he very properly declined their further favours! And these dishonest tradesmen were men making a high profession of religion, leading members of the sect to which they belonged; though better acquainted, as it would seem, with their ready-reckoners than their bibles! It makes one burn with indignation to see Christianity so disgraced; nor can we at all comprehend by what process any man in his senses attains to such utter self-deception: Judas-like, selling his master for a few pieces of silver, while offering the perfidious kiss of ostentatious attachment. Practices of these kinds may afford some solution of the difficulty presented by this contemporaneous existence of enormous wealth and enor mous poverty--an ominous conjunction, which Southey, in his "Moral and Political Essays" (the fifth, on the "State of the Poor, 1816"), thus explains.

After alluding to the distress existing about that time, in connection with an increase of wealth among some classes, he quotes Sir Thomas Bernard to this effect: The poor rate is the barometer which marks in all the apparent sunshine of prosperity-the progress of national weakness and debility; and as trade and manufactures are extended, as our commerce encircles the globe, it increases with a fecundity most astonishing; it grows with our growth, and augments with our strength; its root, according to our present system, being laid in the vital source of our existence and prosperity." And he then goes on to observe, that "the great and rapid increase of national wealth has always been attended by a correspondent pressure of distress upon the peasantry "-illustrating this view (to which it is selfevident that our present condition furnishes no contradiction, but rather confirmation of its general truth), by adducing the state of Spain and Portugal in their literally golden days; when the treasures of the East and the West, the rich produce of the

Indian isles, and the metallic wealth of Mexico and Peru, were poured into those kingdoms, and had the effect, as stated by a contemporary writer, of rendering the poor more wretched and destitute than before! The value of money being diminished, rents raised, and all the necessaries of life advanced in price, the only benefit that accrued to them from these exuberant riches was the miserable one of more abundant almsgiving: this, as it must be borne in mind, being no cure for poverty-only a temporary palliative of the evil. The first years of our Reformation furnish him with another instance; and the nineteenth century might have sat for this portrait :

"A fashion of ambitious expenditure prevailed, which made men live to the utmost of their means. The exertions which were called forth to make the income keep pace with the outgoings roused a spirit of enterprise which displayed itself both in evil and good; commercial and privateering adventures were undertaken abroad; at home, trades and professions raised their fees; the manufacturer worsened his wares; the landholder increased his rents, and the lord enclosed what had been common ground."

These quotations have, of course, an application to the general state of our affairs in this day they do not bear exclusively on that specific class of evils with which we are at present more immediately concerned-those arising from that present tendency to push our foreign coinmerce beyond its healthy limits (for we hold, with Southey, that a State may be too commercial for its real good), to which the manufacturing system has given birth and in reference to which we shall adduce, as illustrative of our own views, some striking passages from that part which is dedicated to this subject of the fourth essay "On the State of the Poor, etc. 1812."

He remarks that Smith's "Wealth of Nations" may be termed the "confession of faith" of this system: and, as we perceive that a cheap copy of it has just been published, ticketed in the windows, "Free-trade edition," we cannot resist the temptation of giving a brief, and by-the-way, review of it, in his opinion of this work which he styles, "a tedicus and hard-hearted book, greatly overvalued even on the score of ability, for fifty pages would have comprised its sum and substance.. ..That book considers man as a manufacturing animal-a definition which escaped the ancients: it estimates his importance, not by the sum of goodness and of knowledge which he possesses-not by the virtues and charities which should flow towards him, and emanate from him-not by the happiness of which he may be the source and centre-not by the duties to which he is called