The bane and antidote of England is her immense manufacturing power--the faculty that enables her to inundate, the whole habitable globe with the products of her industry, is at once the source of her prosperity and poverty--her millionaire mill-owners and her impoverished thousands. Never was the skill of machinery pushed to the same wonderful--never the results of mechanical invention so astoundingly developed. Men, are but the presiding genii over the wonder-working slaves of their creative powers, and the child, is the volition that gives impulse to the giant force of a mighty engine. Subdivision of labour, carried to an extent almost incredible, has facilitated despatch, and induced a higher degree of excellence in every branch of mechanism--human ingenuity is racked, chemical analysis investigated, mathematical research explored--and all, that Mr. Binns, of Birmingham, may make thirteen minikin pins--while Mr. Sims, of Stockport, has been making but twelve. Let him but succeed in this, and straightway his income is quadrupled--his eldest son is member for a manufacturing borough, his second is a cornet in the Life Guards--his daughter, with a fortune of one hundred thousand pounds, is married to the heir of a marquisate--and his wife, soaring above the murky atmosphere of the factory, breathes the purer air of western London, and advertises her _soirees_ in the _Morning Post_. The pursuit of wealth is now the grand characteristic of our age and country; and the headlong race of money-getting seems the great feature of the day. To this end the thundering steamer ploughs the white-crested wave of the broad Atlantic--to this end the clattering locomotive darts through the air at sixty miles the hour--for this, the thousand hammers of the foundry, the ten thousand wheels of the factory are at work--and man, toiling like a galley-slave, scarce takes time to breathe in his mad career, as with straining eyeballs and outstretched hands, he follows in the pursuit of lucre.
Now, men are imitative creatures; and strange enough, too, they are oftentimes disposed from the indulgence of the faculty to copy things, and adapt them to purposes very foreign to their original destination. This manufacturing speed, this steeple-chase of printed calico and Paisley wear, is all very well while it is limited to the districts where it began.