sult in low cost of labor to the employer. Such workmen never have any "blue Monday." The workman who in this country habitually becomes intoxicated is soon discharged, and his place is filled by one who respects himself and values his place too much to risk his position in dissipation.

And since large and increasing quantities of cotton are not only taking the inland routes by rail for use in Northern mills, but also for shipment to Liverpool from New York and Boston, it must be in the nature of things that those who buy in New York and Boston will have an advantage in price about equal to the cost of shipment to England, with insurance and other necessary charges included. This advantage cannot be less than a farthing or half-cent per pound, and the factory that uses cotton in the manufacture of coarse and medium goods, such as are wanted in the markets named, at half a cent a pound advantage in the price, can pay twenty per cent. higher wages and yet land the goods, other things being equal, in neutral markets at the same cost with its foreign competitors who pay the higher price for cotton.

Competition with England in supplying the markets of Asia, Africa, and South America with cotton goods is now perhaps the best criterion by which to gauge our ability to compete in other branches of manufacture. It has been often assumed in England that the increasing shipments of cotton goods from this country have been forced by necessity, and merely consisted of lots sold below cost as a means of obtaining ready money; but there is no ground whatever for this general assumption, even though some small shipments may have been made at first with this view. Again, in one of the largest mills in this Our export of cotton fabrics amounts as yet country, more than one-half of whose to but seven or eight per cent. of our pro- products now go to China and Africa, the duction, and is but a trifle compared to improvements and changes in machinery that of Great Britain; but it is not made since 1860 have given the following reat a loss, and it constitutes a most impor- sult. In 1860 the average year's product of tant element in the returning prosperity one operative was 5,317 lbs. of cloth, and of our cotton-mills. The goods exported the average earnings of women in the mill are mostly made by strong and prosperous were $3.26 per week. In 1878 the average corporations, paying regular dividends. They consist mainly of coarse sheetings and drills, and are sold by the manufacturers to merchants, who send them to China, Africa, and South America in payment for tea, silk, ivory, sugar, gums, hides, and wool. They are not made by operatives who earn less than the recent or present rates of wages in England, but in most departments of the mills by those who earn as much or more. This competition had been fairly begun before the late war in this country, but it is now continued under better conditions. The mills of New England are now relatively much nearer the cotton-fields than they were then, owing to through connections by rail. Prior to 1860 substantially all the cotton went to the seaports of the cotton states, and from there the cost of moving it to the North or to Liverpool varied but little; but at the present day a large and annually increasing portion of the cotton used in the North is bought in the interior markets and carried in covered cars directly to the mills, where the bales are delivered clean, and much more free from damage and waste than those which are carried down the Southern rivers on boats and barges, dumped upon the wharves, and then compressed to the utmost for shipment by sea.

year's product was 7,923 lbs. cloth, and the average of women's earnings $4.34 per week. It may also be considered that the gold dollar of 1878 will buy fifteen to twenty per cent. more of the commodities in common use than the gold dollar of 1860. In that factory the average year's work of one operative will give about one thousand six hundred Chinamen five pounds or sixteen yards each of cotton drill, and the entire cost of labor in making the drill, including all payments made, from the agent who controls the factory down to the scrub who washes the floor, is about one and a quarter cents a yard.

This includes the cost of stamping and packing, the custom of this country being to conduct all the processes of manufacture and the preparation of the cloth for the market in the same establishment. The standard printing cloth, twenty-eight inches wide, the fabric more largely produced than any other, is made at a labor cost of less than one cent a yard, including also all the salaries and wages paid and the cost of packing. It will therefore be apparent that the reason why our exports of manufactured cotton, and for similar reasons of other goods and wares, do not increase more rapidly, is not to be found in any excess of cost or in any fault in quality, but in the simple fact that during

the fifteen years of war, inflation, railway | new conditions shall have been adopted. mania, and municipal extravagance that Our friends abroad must not expect great preceded the hard times from which we and revolutionary changes in the matter of are just emerging, little or no attention was taxation. No oppressive duty on food or could be paid to foreign markets, and compels action, and there are no advocates the very habit of foreign commerce was for rash or rapid changes. Whether right lost. The ways and means of commerce or wrong in principle, our system now in cannot be improvised in a year, or in five force was adopted to meet the emergency years, but the foundations have lately been of war, and our industry has been more or laid, and our competition may soon become less moulded by and to it. Almost all even more serious than it now is, unless sources of direct taxation are absorbed by the increasing demand of our home mar- the states as their own sources of revenue, kets for the products of our mills shall and the national revenue must of necessity again absorb all that we can make. be drawn mainly from duties upon imports. Whether or not we are ready to build mills It would seem that the experience of naof any kind for the purpose of supplying tions during the last five years has proved foreign markets is a question that the fu- that neither protection nor free trade have ture only can determine. availed much to prevent disaster, and per

that there is less discussion on these disputed theories than there was ten years since, but rather an earnest desire on the part of almost all men, whatever their convictions may be, that contention shall be avoided, and that whenever the reform of our war tariff is fairly undertaken, it shall be entered upon with care and deliberation, and proceed with as much regard to caution in making changes as was had in England in the conduct of the great reforms begun in 1842 under the sagacious leadership of Sir Robert Peel.

It may here be proper to say that perhaps from this conviction it now happens haps the migration of industrial centres, so ably treated in a recent number of the Fortnightly Review, is not to be either promoted or prevented by the possession of great deposits of coal and iron. May it not be true that as less and less power is required, as machinery is simplified and made to run with less friction, and as improvements are made in the combustion of coal to the utilization of a larger portion of the force contained in each ton, the mere proximity of coal and iron, and the mere possession of these crude forces will not suffice, but that the control of great It may also be well for our English branches of industry will depend on what friends to consider that according to their may be called finer points. It is not very present theory the removal of duties on many years since a young man came to imports enabled them to manufacture at New England from the far West to visit less cost and greatly enlarged their marthe works where ploughs were made: he kets. If such was the effect of the gradtold the New England craftsmen that they ual and cautious method of change adopted did not fully understand the nature of the at the instance of Sir Robert Peel, and prairie soil, that they had not calculated first applied to the materials which entered the true curves of least resistance, and into the processes of English manufacture, that he intended to establish a plough fac- what might be the effect of the same tory on the Mississippi. They did not method in our case? If we begin by much fear his competition, but now his abating the duties on materials, while great factory, employing hundreds of moderately reducing those on finished workmen, furnishes ploughs even for east- products which must be kept at a revenue point in almost any case, may not our comThe recent period of depression has petition become greater rather than less? taught the lesson of economy in all manu- If it is becoming serious while we are factures, and the northern or manufactur- handicapped according to the English ing states are just ready to begin work theory by a very high war tariff, what may under the conditions of a sound currency it be when by common consent without and a system of taxation which, though yet onerous and unfit in many ways, is but a light burthen compared to what it has been. The country is fairly launched upon the discussion of economic questions, a discussion which will not end until the system of national taxation best fitted to our

ern use.

LIVING AGE, No. 1808, p. 323.

contention it is modified and reduced in a judicious way, and one carefully considered so as not to cause disaster by too radical changes? That such must be the method of change all are now agreed, to whatever school they belong.

In reading articles written in England regarding the effect of tariff legislation in the United States, it frequently appears

to be the opinion of the writers that the | our vast fields of adjacent coal and iron people of this country have made a mis- could long remain unused. Even in these take in undertaking any branch of manu- last three or four years of extreme depresfacturing industry, and that they would sion, a large number of new furnaces have have been much more prosperous had they been constructed and put in blast in the confined their attention mainly to agricul- Hocking Valley of Ohio, and the producture; conversely that the manufactures of tion of the best iron is increasing with the United States would cease to exist if great rapidity at that point. Neither can they were not sustained by a very high it be assumed that with our advantage of and in many respects prohibitive tariff. position in respect to the production of An example of this method of reasoning cotton and food, we could be prevented is found in the reprint of a series of other- from at least manufacturing the coarse wise very able articles by Mr. A. J. Wil- and medium goods that constitute far more son, under the title of the "Resources of than one-half of the world's demand for Foreign Countries." Mr. Wilson says: cotton fabrics; or that a people whose "There is no use in denying the plain fact ancestors had clothed themselves in homethat the States have succeeded by their spun woollen cloth, could long be prevented high-tariff policy in diverting a consider- from applying machinery to at least the able part of the industrial energies of the common fabrics that serve the purposes of community from the pursuits natural to, the million. and most profitable in, a new country, to Apart even from these special branches, the highly artificial, and, for America, we should surely retain our work in steel mostly very expensive industries of long-wares, for which we even now import a settled and civilized nations. Were the part of the raw material, and yet send the sheltering tariff swept away, it is very finished product back to Sheffield to be questionable if any, save a few special sold; we should retain our great manufacmanufactures of certain kinds of tools, ture of leather and all its products; of iron machinery, railway cars, and fancy goods, wares of every name and nature; of all and a few of the cruder manufactures, the products of wood in which we excel; could maintain their ground." of all the tools and machinery of agriculture and of the railway service; of all the fittings for the building of houses; of clothing, of carriages and wagons; in short, of all the lesser branches of manufacturing and mechanical industry which may not impose upon the imagination by the magnitude of the buildings in which they are conducted, but yet give employment to millions where the operatives in the special branches to which the term manufactures is apt to be limited can be counted only by hundreds of thousands. The time has gone by for any one to dream of relegating the people of this country to the single pursuit of agriculture under any possible policy, or even to the crude forms of manufacture. Foreign nations can never again supply us with any large proportion of the staple goods or wares that constitute the principal part of our use of manufactured articles. Goods which depend upon fashion, fancy, and style, and articles of comfort or luxury that we can afford to buy abroad, we shall import in ever-increasing quantities as our means of payment increase with our returning prosperity, and we shall, doubtless, continue to collect a large revenue from them. It may also be considered that the repugnance to direct taxation is so great that even if it were generally admitted that indirect taxation was much more costly, the majority of

It probably escaped Mr. Wilson's notice that a nation that had passed through a popular national election under the most exciting conditions possible, such as the last election of president, without an act of violence in the whole land, had a sort of claim to be called civilized; but apart from this unconscious slip of the pen the whole assumption may be questioned. The fallacy lies in the common unthinking habit of confining the term manufactures to the product of great textile factories, iron-mills, and metal works. It is not even necessary to remind writers as able as Mr. Wilson that the war of the Revolution was greatly promoted by the attempt of Great Britain to prevent the establishment of iron and steel works and manufactures of wool in the American colonies; but we may admit that if the sheltering tariff were suddenly swept away, great disaster might ensue to special branches of industry that have undoubtedly been developed or promoted by its enactment. Even then the vast proportion of our manufactures would remain unimpaired, and the industries harmed by "sweeping" changes such as not even the most pronounced believers in ultimate free trade would now dream of proposing, could only be retarded in their development. It cannot be assumed by any observant man that

the "

66

descension. He joked with the young
ladies, and had his cracks with the men.
Everybody was ambitious of drinking
healths with this great man, who bore the
process exceedingly well, and seemed only
to become more good-humored and jocular
(perhaps a little broader in his fun) as the
hobnobbing went on.
After supper, he

swered the purpose for which it was pro- | everybody was tolerably unrestrained. vided. Spite of his quiet habits he found Old Sandy Chisholm appeared there at himself more than once in the stream first the very pink of good-humored conwhich, like that brook which brags that it goes on forever, flowed incessantly towards tap" where a dozen colored people dispensed powerful refreshments through a window opening on a veranda, and freely exchanged compliments and observations with their customers. He understood, for he sympathized with, the thirst of his own sex; but it made him open his eyes to see dainty, delicate girls come up to the bar and toss off tumblers of beer, while the attendants remarked to them, My, missy, you really lubly dis evening! me long for come hax you to dance;" or Hei, my sweet missy, you too hansom! you pleay de debbil wid de buckrah gentlemen to-night; fifty or a hunded of dem, me hear, like a-mad, preasin' for you beauty. Gad sen' dere doan't nobody killed before de mornin', dat all me say! and he marvelled to see them, thus refreshed, return to the business of the evening with a ten times better will than when they began. The entertainment, he says, took place in the court-house. The fresh night air was let in from all sides, and would have been more agreeable than it was if, in passing through the verandas and doors and windows, it had not swept over some hundreds of negroes and negresses who thronged these communications, and laughed and shouted and made remarks with tolerable freedom, so as to elicit sometimes from within a hint of cowskin.

"S'ep me gad, massa, it not me! it dis Bungo; for him dam v'ice fabour mine. Hei, Bungo! is you not asheamed of you'self? my king !”*

swore he would have a reel; and calling forth some of his countrymen and countrywomen, roared at the orchestra for "Loard Macdonald." But to the "spring" the native band was quite unequal: howbeit, a hard-baked Caledonian of the company, laying hold of a musician's feedle, made it as potent as the chanter of Alister M'Alister, and set them working like dervishes. Old Chisholm vaulted and wrig gled and tossed his nose in the air, and snapped his fingers, and, every time the tune recommenced, shouted like a Stentor. Never mind if it was in the tropics; the fit was on, and the dance kept going with such animation as was never seen before, and never since, except, perhaps, in Alloway Kirkyard. By Jupiter, it appears to have been great fun! But the ensign could not, he says, have given his description of it at the time, or for years after. His eyes took in all that was going on, but his mind was intent on far other things. He had gone to the ball determined to bring his suspense to an end, if only Arabella could be wrought for a while into a serious mood. But he was thrown off his balance, at first entering the room, by the sight of Mr. Spence dancing with Miss Chisholm and looking much at his ease nay, supremely happy. This need not have discouraged the ensign, but it was in those days his disposition to be timid and diffident in matters of feeling. He was

And then such a supper! which for solidity, the ensign says, was fit to put be-like enough to be shy and unready at the fore famished troopers in northern Europe. The viands disappeared, though, at a great rate; and the flying of corks kept up a feu-de-joie till long after daybreak. Some few gentlemen, it is hinted, did not, after the third or fourth visit to the supper-room, leave that apartment again until they were assisted out into the sunshine; and some others who did leave it stood about the walls of the ball-room, a little noisy and facetious. But offences like these were easily condoned; for, says Clifton,

best of times; but an unfavorable incident might have the effect of painfully increasing his bashfulness. He was conscious that his resolution had received a check, and angry with himself that such was the case; while into his mind, as he stood gazing half entranced at the dancers, came some lines of a poet who was known to youths of that time as well as Moore is to those of the present day:—

*

Every passion but fond love
Unto its own redress does move;
But that alone the wretch inclines
To what prevents his own designs;

* Waller.