but the prodigious encrease of demand for labour they finally occasion, by lowering the price and thus encreasing the demand for the article they are employed to produce, far indeed overbalances the evil. The long experience of Europe has settled the question, that population is permanently supported and encreased by the introduction of machinery. One of the most ingenious arguments on the other side of the question, is Lord Byron's speech in the house of lords, on the Nottingham frame-breaking bill, lately published in Dallas' recollections of Lord Byron; it is a good specimen of plausible declamation in favour of the stocking-weavers, who would have been starved had his views of the subject been adopted.

Suppose for instance in that case, the improvement in the stocking frame had been prohibited at Nottingham: it would have been erected elsewhere: and the extension of sales and the increase of profit would have gone elsewhere. At present the weavers are encreased in number and prosperity by the great encrease of demand for the article, and demand for labour. It has been so with the art of printing, the cotton machinery, with the steam engine, with rail roads and canals, with the nail-cutting, the card-making, the screw-making, the carding machines of our own country. Were the argument to be deemed conclusive that no machine can be erected that throws out of employ a number of men though but for a season, all improvement must stop, for every improvement does so: each of them saves labour, or perforins the labour of men more cheaply, or more accurately. The objection will lie from the first introduction of a sail in a canoe, to the last improvement in a man of war: from the Indian hominy block and hand carding, to the rice mill, the cotton gin, and Perkins' steam engine.

The introduction of machinery, at first lowers wages, lowers the price of the article, and encreases the profits of the manufacturer who introduces it. In a short time, capital flows towards the source of profit, and circumstances gradually arrive at their level. So long as the machinery can be worked exclusively by an individual or a nation, so long it is the source of encreased and exclusive profit. By degrees all improvements are extended; first at home, and then by very slow degrees to foreign nations.

Manufacturing machines may assuredly be detrimental to the labourers whom they throw out of employ. But as they produce a greater profit and a greater demand for the article, they add to the mass of wealth and of capital, the only source whence employment, wages, food, population, are derived. They are therefore beneficial to the nation because the ultimate effect is a balance of good. To the work people thus thrown out of employment, they are undoubted evils. It is easy for a specu lating Political Economist to say, these discharged work people will turn their attention to some other means of employment. How are they to live in the mean time, if they have neglected to save when full employment enabled them? Their wages do little more than furnish them and their families with food from day to day in such a country as England. A week's want, will bring them on the parish. Moreover, the books of Political Economy do not sufficiently consider that time is one of the elements that should always be taken into consideration. It is not easy to move twenty thousand pounds from one branch of manufacture to another, or to convert a man whose life has been employed in spinning cotton or making pins, into a seaman or a farmer.

The introduction and improvement of machinery, then, appears to me always productive of more or less misery among the poor for a short time. But we are not to legislate upon every case where the imperfection of human arrangements, is productive of some portion of unavoidable evil. If the clear result of the improvement be a balance of good, we ought to be content. Good, pure and unmixed, is not to be expected in the course of human affairs. Moreover, why is an ingenious and industrious man to be prohibited from exerciseing his ingenuity and industry, when they give him an advantage over his less capable, less skilful, or less energetic neighbour? Are we to make laws for the protection of imbecillity? Or to put a weight on the shoulders of a strong man, that he may be brought down to the level of performance of his weaker competitor? If the introduction of machinery adds to profit, adds to the demand for the article, adds to the perfection of the article, adds to the wealth of the manufacturer and thereby to the wealth of the nation, and thereby to capital, and by capital to employment, by employment to wages and food, and by them to the mass of

healthy population.-If articles before scare and dear, and confined to the few, are brought within the purchase of the manyand the comforts, conveniencies and pleasures of life made procurable at a cheaper rate—it is enough. We ought to be contented with such a result, although it be attended for a short time with an amount of evil which we are unable compleately to provide against.*

CHAPTER 20.

OF GOVERNMENTAL ENCOURAGEMENTS Of Manufacture and Commerce by Prohibitions, Restrictions, and Imposts on Particular Importations.

Suppose, at the debates on the framing of our federal constitution, or the constitution of any of our individual states, a member of the convention had gotten up and proposed that the legislature should have the power whenever it saw fit, to protect the industry of one class of the citizens at the expence of all the rest: or to grant exclusive privileges to one class at the expence of all the rest: would such a proposition have been carried? Or to prohibit the merchant from his accustomed trade, because some other citizens could not profitably commence a manufacture without this prohibition: or to tax the community generally in favour of any manufacturer whose business would be a losing concern without such a contribution in his favour? And should propose that these regulations should take place, whenever the general welfare of the community seemed in the opinion of Congress to

* The improvements by machinery may be partly estimated from the following instances:

The printing press was introduced into Paris in the reign of Lou. XI: it soon turned six thousand copiests out of employ, In Paris there are now sixty thousand persons who live by printing.

The stocking frame superceded nine tenths of the former labour. Thn steam engines of Great Britain supply the labour of two millions of workmen.

A pin which took eighteen hands to fabricate in the days of Dr. Adam Smith, is at present made by a machine at the rate of sixty pins per minute.

The power loom, weaves a piece of shirting of twenty-eight yards in a minute. About fifteen English miles in length per day. (Heywood's discourse at the Liverpool Institute, 1824.)

require such an operation? Would such a proposal have been countenanced?

Would it not have been said, this is a governmert of liberty and equality: framed for the common protection of every kind of honest industry, and of all the citizens alike? How can the general welfare be promoted by taxing the whole community, to make up the losses of any individual who choses to employ his time and money in a losing concern? What right can a government have to tax me, in order that my son or my grandson may carry on a trade profitably half a century hence, which is a losing trade now, and must be for many years to come? How can the community be benefitted by paying a manufacturer a bounty at my expence, taken out of my pocket, not for my benefit but for his? We want a government to protect equally the honest pursuits of all the citizens, and not to favour, or to foster one class more than the rest. This is not equal justice; and we will confer no such power. But ignorant and selfish legislators have gradually assumed this power, under pretence of promoting the general welfare: a pretence that would equally justify transferring the young wife of an elderly man to a younger man, as transferring the money of A into the pocket of B, without a satisfactory equivalent. Where will you limit the all-devouring pretence of the general welfare? Napoleon Buonaparte pretended it was for the general welfare of the French nation that he should repudiate Josephine and take to wife Maria Louisa. I suppose it was for the general welfare that Caligula appointed his horse to the consulship.

I know of no pretence, no motive that can be set up, so well calculated to cover and protect every possible fraud on the people's rights, as the GENERAL WELFARE. It has no limitation: it extends to all things, to all times, persons, places, and proposals. There is no tyranny that it will not authorize. If the proposal had been made at any of our confederations, in plain language exposing its real features, no convention could have transferred it to the government about to be framed. Its actual adoption by the federal government I regard as neither more or less than rank usurpation. It is the assumption of legislative power in a degree not conceded by any expressions in the constitution; not necessary to the purposes of the community; and

as at present exercised, professing to promote the general welfare by partial distributions of national protection.

These governmental regulations may be either prohibitions en importation, or bounties on exportation.

A foreign commodity may be prohibited entirely and directly: or partially and indirectly, by means of imposts laid on its importation.

Exportation may be encouraged by bounties, by drawbacks, by treaties of commerce conferring particular privileges on the manufactures and mercantile exports in some foreign country, with whom the treaty is made.

The gross ignorance so recently manifested on this subject in our own country, induces me to dwell particularly on this feature of the manufacturing and commercial system. A system founded on fraud, misrepresentation, and intrigue on part of the monopolists-and ignorance on part of the mass of the nation who are made the dupes and the prey of those speculators.

First then, of restraints upon importation in favour of such commodities as can be produced at home. I shall adopt in great part the reasonings and expression of Smith and Say on this sub-. ject. Wealth of Nations, B 4, ch. 1 and 2.

The following extract from Miller's Inquiry into the Statute and Criminal Law of England, (1822,) will furnish a proper preface for the succeeding remarks (p. 30:)

"2. Another set of laws which have greatly helped to swell the statute book, are those which grant bounties on exportation or importation, and those which prohibit exportation or importation for a limited or unlimited time."

"It is not within the scope of these observations to say any thing respecting the wisdom of the policy by which these enactments have successively been dictated. It is only alleged that their number has exceedingly incumbered the law, and that so many of them have been suspended, repealed, and re-enacted, either in whole or in part, that persons whose private interests lead them to consult them, cannot discover with reasonable precision either what the law was or is, with regard to almost any one commodity. The great law against importation is 3 Edward IV. c. 4. passed in 1463, which affords so excellent a specimen of the language used on subsequent similar occasions that it is here inserted. "Whereas in the said parliament, by the