truism.

Nevertheless an illustration or two may show
Between the intelligence

more clearly what I mean.
and the hand there is a correspondence so delicate, so
minute, that it bears one of the strongest evidences
of the wisdom of our Maker. The versatility of the
mind in its operations can never be measured; never-
theless the flexibility of the hand is such that it corre-
sponds with the versatility of the mind. The man who
in the dim morning of society made a flint knife had a
hard labour to execute works of skill. The man who
succeeding him had a Sheffield blade could do perhaps
a thousand operations which the flint knife could not ac-
complish. Now we read that in the time of Edward III.
a tax was laid upon the property of England for a war
against France, and in Colchester, at that day one of
the largest towns, a tax was laid upon all property..
The names of all the tradesmen, artificers, and resi-
dents were taken down, with the value and description
of their property, and I think the whole amount came
to something like 3000l. or 4000l.; and yet Colchester
was then about the tenth town of importance in Eng-
land. There was a carpenter in the town, whose whole
stock-in-trade was taxed, and the value of his implements
and tools was put down at one shilling. We will not
calculate the difference of the value in money; he pos-
sessed two axes, one adze, a square, and a naviger for
making wheels. Supposing that this carpenter, who
was far beyond the man with only a Sheffield blade, and
still farther beyond the man with the flint knife only,
were to find himself in such a shop as Holtzapffel's
in Long Acre, and were to see himself surrounded with

planes and bevel planes and finisters and centre-bits, and I know not what, he would believe that he had got into a magician's palace, or that he himself had a hundred hands, and every one of those hands had a hundred operations that is to say, mechanical instruments give to the intelligence an outlet, arm it with power, invest it with a variety and a tact and a delicacy of execution, so great that we can set no limit to its capacity.

Next, labour with invention is the condition of all creation. I should like to know—if the Mayor of Leeds, who is the highest authority here, will tell me-how many hands were employed in making a yard of cloth when cloth was sold upon the bridge? Compare it with the number of hands employed in making a yard of cloth now, when we are seated here in the Mechanics' Institute. The other day I made a calculation on this point. You will find in the little book to which I have already referred, and from which, if there be anything that I am saying worthy of your hearing, I may confess it is in most part derived—that there must be now some five-and-twenty operations before ever we get a coat of Leeds cloth on our back. I will throw out the farmer, and the factor, and the shipper, and the carrier, until we get the wool into Leeds: and I then find certain operations which were to me occult and mysterious, the very names of which I had never heard before, and cannot even now understand, but I have no doubt to practised ears I shall only be speaking words of a most familiar language. I find there were sorters and scourers and dyers and carders and slubbers and spinners; and that there was warping and weaving and burling

and muling and dressing and gigging and brushing and singeing and friezing, as I suppose it ought to be, and drawing-that is to say, sixteen distinct skilful operations. Invention has separated the tangled skein of labour, and has thrown off separate threads into a multitude of hands-these operations have become finer and finer and continually more perfect by that operation. I suppose that I ought to add that the calculation says there are still five-and-twenty thousand stitches before. the coat is put on our back; and this too shows how minutely labour is subdivided, and how in that minuteness of labour perfection is ever advancing.

Well, further than this, I have already said I can remember the time of what were called the Swing riots. I daresay in the North of England the fame of Swing may not be so familiar as it is to me, who have lived all my life in the South; but I remember well at that time I was living in the county of Kent, and night after night I saw the horizon red with the burning of threshing-machines and of rick-yards. Madness had been infused into the minds of our simple agricultural population. They believed that machinery was their ruin. We have now happily, and I think through the action of Mechanics' Institutes more than any other agency, come to a period when our whole population, agricultural and manufacturing, recognise that the advancement and multiplication of machinery is the greatest aid to them in creating labour. In order to give the simplest proof of this-if proof be needed, and from your response I see it cannot be-I will mention one or two facts which may not be familiar to some who

hear me. Until the other day they were not familiar to myself. First of all, in the last century, inventions followed one another in a rapid succession. As you are well aware, in 1743 the fly-shuttle was invented; in 1769 the son of the inventor constructed what is called the drop-box; in 1767 came the spinning-jenny, in 1769 the water-frame, in 1779 the two were combined into the mule, in 1813 the power-loom followed; in 1765 the steam-engine had been completed, in 1811 steam was applied to ships, and in 1824 it was applied to railroads. That is to say, taking only one line of invention—that which applies to the manufacture of cotton and woolthis extraordinary advancement in machinery was attained in two-and-twenty years. Then the power of locomotion by land and by sea was added. Now what was the effect of this? At first sight it might have been supposed that it would have thrown out of employment a vast number of hands.

M. Say, the French political economist, in his complete Course of Political Economy, states, upon the authority of an English manufacturer of fifty years' experience, that in ten years after the introduction of the machines the people employed in the trade-spinners and weavers- were more than forty times as many as when the spinning was done by hand. According to a calculation made in 1825, it appears that the power of 20,000 horses was employed in the spinning of cotton, and that the power of each horse yielded, with the aid of machinery, as much yarn as 1066 persons could produce by hand. But if this calculation be correct-and there is no reason to doubt it--the spinning machinery

of Lancashire alone produced in 1825 as much yarn as would have required 21,302,000 persons to produce with the distaff and spindle. In order to bring down our calculation to a nearer time, I find in Mr. Brassey's most interesting address on wages the other day, before the Social Science Association at Norwich, this statement he says: Messrs. Bridges & Holmes estimate that the proportion of spindles in 1833 [eight years later than the date I have quoted] was 112 to each hand, while the corresponding number at the present day would be 517. The speed of the mule has been so much increased that more stretches are now made in ten and a half hours than formerly in twelve. In 1848 a woman would have had only two looms; now she will attend to four. The speed of the power-loom in 1833 varied between 90 and 112; it now varies between 170 and 200 picks in a minute." The great Pyramid in Egypt is one of the mechanical wonders of the world, and we have no certain knowledge of the mechanism by which the stone was lifted into its place from the quarry, but we have one mode of estimating the amount of labour that was employed on it. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, hated the memory of the kings who built the Pyramids, and he tells us that the great Pyramid occupied 100,000 men for twenty years in its erection. Now it has been calculated that the steamengines of England, worked by 36,000 men, would raise the same quantity of stones from the quarry and elevate them to the same height as the great Pyramid in eighteen hours. If this be so, it seems to be a proof. 1 Wages in 1873, p. 39. By Thos. Brassey, M.P. (Longmans, 1873).