the English rate of wages to the continental level; and so long as they persisted in this blunder, the cause of Free Trade made but little progress. On the other hand, Sir Robert Peel, with characteristic good sense, had pointed out that these laws were injurious, not to class interests, but to imperial interests. They imposed restrictions on imports, but as all commerce ultimately resolves itself into barter, a restriction on imports ultimately amounts to a restriction on exports, and consequently is a restriction on the industry by which those exports are produced. But his own experience showed him that as the progress of manufacturing industry developed the industrial resources of the country, so the value of land was raised in the market, and consequently he saw that the landowners and agriculturists must share in any future depression of the manufacturing classes, and that their policy of protection was something like a realization of the fable of the boy who killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It is absurd to say that Manchester was either the birthplace or the cradle of Free Trade; it can only claim the merit of reviving the demand for the repeal of an impolitic law, which had been allowed to slumber during a period of great political excitement and some commercial prosperity; and when the revival of the demand took place, it would have been well if the sound principles enunciated by Sir Robert Peel in 1815, had been universally adopted by those who engaged in the new movement.

The results which Sir Robert Peel predicted actually followed; England entered into a war of hostile tariffs with rival states; seasons of commercial depression came round with almost a fixed periodicity; great numbers of operatives emigrated, and are now contributing to the wealth of France in the mills and print-works of Normandy and Alsace; finally, the landlords and farmers derived only a temporary advantage from those laws, which was more than counterbalanced by the

loss which they sustained in seasons of depression, from the diminished ability of the operative classes to become consumers of their produce. While we readily join in the applause due to those by whose labours these evils have been removed, let us not forget the gratitude due to those who strenuously exerted themselves to prevent their occurrence.

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CHAPTER III.

THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL, AND THE FACTORY SYSTEM.

THE Peel family had so large a share in the organization of the factory system, that, in a work like the present, it is necessary to take some brief notice of the subject. A factory, as distinguished from a workshop, may be regarded as a place where a number of workmen combine their labours, and are assisted in their different processes by the agency of the same moving power. Water and steam are the agencies usually employed in cotton-mills and print-works; the power they create is carried by means of turning shafts to different rooms in a large edifice, or to separate buildings; so that, while in one room the moving power helps to clean the cotton, it cards the material in another, forms it into a sliver, mills those slivers, so as to give them uniformity of texture, elongates the sliver to the requisite degree of tenuity, and twists it into a thread, passing from one room to another in the different stages. Not unfrequently, the same power helps to prepare the thread for the loom, and weaves it into cloth.

Now, if these processes were carried on in separate establishments, there would be a great waste of time, and a probable loss and injury of material, in removing the unfinished article from one place to another; and the same moving power could no longer be employed to assist in all the processes. These processes, moreover, are so dependent on each other, that the stoppage of one obviously necessitates the stoppage of all: if the carders refuse to work, the spinners will have nothing to do; and if the spinners do not consume