millions. The brutal policy of Buonaparte had, however, shut out our manufacture from the continent, and now, when a favourable opening was appearing once more, the right honourable gentleman was going to impose taxes which would produce all the effects of Buonaparte's continental system. The poor people were just recovering from the distress they had so deeply experienced, but he was persuaded that this measure would again involve them in misery not much inferior to that which they were escaping. He would venture to assert, that if the raw material was suffered to come free into the ports of Great Britain, that the produce to the revenue would be three times as great from the export of manufactured goods as from the duties now proposed to be laid on the raw material. It had been the wise maxim of Mr. Pitt to get as much as possible of the raw material into the country, and when there was a surplus, to let it find its way out again. The Board of Trade had been beset by some cotton-merchants, who proposed this absurd measure. They were told that this duty was intended as a regulation to encourage the cotton of the West Indies; but he would ask, whether they were to be always at war with America? Were they to send their money for the raw material to the East Indies, where their manufactures would not be worn in return? He hoped that this mischievous policy would not be adhered to, and that the good sense of ministers would induce them to abandon it.

The repeal of the impolitic cotton-tax was one of the great financial reforms effected during the late administration of the second Sir Robert Peel, but it is not generally known that in the still greater measure, the repeal of the Corn-laws, the late premier adopted the course of policy which his father had recommended more than thirty years before, for when the Corn-laws were proposed, in the beginning of 1815, by Mr. Frederic Robinson (now Earl of Ripon), they were

strenuously opposed by the first Sir Robert Peel. He said that it was an error to suppose that the interests of the landholder and of the manufacturer were conflicting and incompatible. They were, in the view of enlightened policy, the same; and the success or ruin of the one was the success or ruin of the other, inasmuch as the country generally had been enriched by the sale of our manufactures, the landholders had received their share of the wealth and advantages. It had been the wise policy of former governments to keep the price of the chief article of subsistence as low as possible; upon this principle Mr. Pitt had acted with success, but the system was now about to be changed. It was undoubtedly true that the rent of land would be diminished by the unlimited importation of corn;* but if the Resolutions upon the table passed in their present shape, the manufactures of the towns. would be destroyed, and the land must consequently be depreciated; corn might be grown, but paupers would be the only customers for it. It was, in truth, impossible to separate the two interests. The value of land within memory had in some places increased threefold; the owners had derived their benefit from the political state of things, and now they must suffer the depreciation produced by an alteration of that political state. With respect to our manufactures, it was allowed that during the war our triumphant situation on the sea had enabled us to force a trade without rivals; but now we were open to competition, it would be madness in us to throw fresh obstacles in the way of those who had so many to contend against. In his opinion, it might be fairly argued, that the manufacturer had been the great benefactor of the landed interest. He did not say that his design was to serve the landowner. That had been the result of the flourishing state of our manufactures; and in the difficulties now to be encoun

The fact that the value of land has risen since the repeal of the Corn-laws shows that this opinion, which was general at the time, is fallacious.

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