dish, and is eaten by them with the same appetite and pleasure as we eat the best partridges." "The

Captain Rudland, R. N., who accompanied Salt, says, skin was only partly taken off, and a favourite slice of the flesh was brought immediately to table, the muscles of which continued to quiver till the whole was devoured."

Salt himself, who has absurdly joined Lord Valentia in depreciating Bruce, thus writes in the journal which he composed for Pearce, the English sailor, of whom there is a full account in Fuller's Travels, which we noticed in our last number, and whose life is, we believe, about to be published:" A soldier, attached to the party, proposed cutting a shulade from one of the cows they were driving before them to satisfy the cravings of their hunger. This terni Mr. Pearce did not at first understand, but he was not long left in doubt on the subject, for the others having assented, they laid hold of the animal by the horns, threw it down, and proceeded without further ceremony to the operation. This consisted of cutting out two pieces of flesh from the buttock near the tail, which, together, Mr. Pearce supposed might weigh a pound. As soon as they had taken these away, they sewed up the wounds, plaistered them over with cow-dung, and drove the animal forward while they divided among their party the reeking steaks."

Mr. Coffin, Lord Valentia's valet, who was left by him in Abyssinia, and who is now in England, has declared to the author of the life, that he has not only seen the operation per formed, but that he has performed it himself, and that he did it at Cairo in the presence of an English nobleman of high character, whose name he referred to.

Such is the testimony that may satisfy persons who are disposed to doubt, and there are many of the class of the old woman who listened with admiring credulity to all her sailor-boy told her of monsters, prodigies, and wonders, till he came to talk of the flying fish, when she stopt him as drawing too largely on her powers of belief, and attempting to impose on her understanding. For ourselves we never wanted all these and other confirmations of Bruce's truth." Honest man, though proud," is written on every page of his work; and more than this, his is a book that all the powers of man could not have invented, and which would be far more marvellous as a forgery than as a narrative of real events. Major Head's biography, however, cannot fail to have a favourable influence on the future fame and reputation of the noble and high-minded author; and if the spirits of the departed are permitted to watch the proceedings of their fellow mortals yet resting on earth, sweet will be the

sight of these labours to the soul of " Man."

Yagoube, the White

ART. XIII.-1. Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages, delivered before the University of Oxford, in Easter Term, 1830. With a Preface on the Causes and Remedies of the present Disturbances. By Nassau William Senior, of Magdalen College, A. M.; late Professor of Political Economy.-1830.

2. Correspondence between the Right Hon. R. Wilmot Horton and a Select Class of the Members of the London Mechanics Institution, formed for investigating the most efficient remedies for the present distress among the labouring classes in the United Kingdom; together with the Resolutions unanimously adopted by the Class. Also a Letter from the Right Hon. R. Wilmot Horton to Dr. Birkbeck, President of the Institution: and his Answer.-1830. 3. The Life and History of Swing, the Kent Rick-burner. Written by himself.-1830.

I F Noah and his family, when they came out of the ark, had held a council upon the best way of providing themselves with the comforts of dry land, it would have been a strange line of argument for one of the household to have pointed to the stock in trade which had escaped the deluge, and have said, "This is a plough; and by harnessing the clean beasts to it, you would do six times as much work as with a spade; therefore break the plough, and take the spade. Your wife too has a spindle, with which she can spin so many threads an hour; but I could show her a way, that would not spin half as much. Let us be machine-breakers; and then we shall all be comfortable."

This would be such gross absurdity, that it is hardly prac ticable to set about stating wherein the absurdity consists. It is like a man's cutting off his legs, in order that he may have the pleasure of hopping upon crutches. Noah's brief answer would be, that he worked to have; and that the more he had, the better. The wildest enemy of machinery would never dream of executing such a principle in his own immediate concerns; or of taking the worse instrument when he might take the better, for the simple pleasure of having more to do. The case, therefore, does not present a parallel to the existing question on the subject of machinery.

Take, then, another state of mankind, as for instance Abraham's; who had men-servants and women-servants, and a steward to look after them. Now if the steward had proposed,

that the men should be set to dig instead of plough, and the women weave cloth with their fingers instead of using the best piece of loom-machinery the country was acquainted with, and that the reason for all this was, that without it there would be no possibility of keeping them in employment, - the answer of Abraham would be much the same as Noah's, but with the addition, that if their work could be saved in one way, he would be answerable for finding them work in some other that if the women could make two pieces of cloth instead of one, his wife should wear two at once, or else wear one that by its beauty should take as much making as two.

;

But if the steward was an obstinate person, and had an anti-machinery maggot in his head, he might reply, that if each servant could do twice as much as before, it was evident only half the number would be wanted, and therefore half must be either sold to the Midianites, or left to perish in the desert, which would be very hard upon the individuals. To which his master would reply, that if the gift of doing double work should fall on all of them at once as from the clouds, there might be some possibility of a part of them being an encumbrance; but if there was any thing gradual in the operation, he, the master, would be answerable for work springing up for them as fast as they could find the means of doing it, and that not a hoof should be left behind in consequence of improvements in the method. And if the master, as there appears no reason to doubt, was fond of seeing every body satisfied about him, he would take an opportunity of representing to his people and followers, that it would be hard if the improvements did not in some degree turn to the advantage of every one of them ;-that if there was more corn by ploughing than by digging, there must needs be better feeding for themselves, their wives, and their little ones; and that if cloth was easier made and more abundant, it was scarcely possible that the result should not be that the children would come by three shirts a-year instead of two. There would be no doubt that a principal portion of the advantage would fall to the share of the rich master and his immediate relatives; but it would also be certain, that the servants down to the lowest would be better and not worse for the alteration, and that they would be unreasonable if they raised a hue-and-cry against the change.

This then, if any body has thought worth while to follow it, appears to let into the whole secret of the good and evil of machinery. It is a good to every body, working classes included, if only it does not come so rapidly as to throw great masses of people out of employment, faster than the consequent

demand for hands in other branches can take them up. If the community in general by dint of machinery get a piece of cloth for six shillings instead of ten, they will to a certainty expend the four shillings in something else that they would not have expended it in before ;-unless it can be proved that they will throw it into the sea. If therefore there is a diminution of employment for cloth-makers to the amount of four shillings (which is undeniably the case), there is at the same time an increase of expenditure on some other arts and crafts to the same amount. But if other arts and crafts are affected in a like manner by machinery, each of these throws an increase of expenditure on some others, among which the craft of cloth-making will undoubtedly have a share. And if wages fall when employment is diminished, they rise when it is increased. So that provided only the introduction of machinery be gradual and general, there is an evident tendency towards a balance; and though nobody can say that the balance shall be so complete as to leave every thing exactly as before, it is plain that the final alteration is the difference of the particular alterations, and not the sum. But all this time, there is a clear gain to the consumers at every step, of the whole amount of what is saved in each instance by machinery,-or what in the case of the cloth was represented by four shillings. So that while the effects upon the different operatives, in respect of their quantity of employment, go on balancing and counteracting each other, and are in the end next to none at all,-the gains of the consumers (of whom the operatives make part) go on increasing and accumulating by every particular addition. Or to turn the subject the other side up, if machinery of all kinds in all places could be annihilated at once by an Act of Parliament or a thunderbolt, the quantity of employment for operatives would on the whole be just what it is now; but the operatives would take their share, with every body else, of the consequences of cloth being made with fingers instead of with a loom. That is, they would wear just so much cloth, and of such quality, as could be made with fingers by the exertion of the same time and labour which make what they now wear from the loom; and the same in other things. And note further, that this includes only the home trade. But if ever foreign commerce should cease to be prohibited by Act of Parliament, then there must be taken into the account all the good things that might be obtained from foreigners in exchange for the products of machinery, and the share which the operatives would have in these good things by dint of the increased employment which would be created by the demand for manufactured goods. VOL. XIV.-Westminster Review.

The blunder therefore of desiring to put down machinery, is in the main and in the long run the same as the contemptible fallacy of restrictions upon trade, which is pressed upon the operatives by the supporters of the Corn Laws. The apparent gain made at every step of restriction either on trade or on machinery, is balanced by an equal loss to some other portion of the industrious classes somewhere else, and there is a clear unbalanced loss of the amount in question to the consumers in the aggregate besides. But the operatives are to be persuaded, that if John, Thomas, Richard, and Henry, get sixpence each, by at the same time taking_twopence out of the pocket of each of the other three, John, Thomas, Richard, and Henry make a gain; and not only this, but they do so if John, Thomas, Richard and Henry in their quality of consumers, lose another sixpence among them every time besides. This is the sum and substance of the system that calls itself protection to trade. It is a plan to set every body to rob the rest, and count the plunder as a general gain. The subject, as relates to trade, has been examined at length in a former article*, under the illustration of the monkeys in Exeter Change who chose to feed out of each other's pans; where it was shown that the land monopoly is the great baboon of all, for whose benefit the lesser apes are persuaded to aid in keeping up the fraud.

Machinery then, like the rain of heaven, is a present blessing to all concerned, provided it comes down by drops, and not by tons together; and any thing which prevents its free and expanded operation, has an effect of the same kind as would be produced if the rain could be collected into waterspouts. It remains therefore to be seen, what laws and human institutions have done towards securing the free diffusion of the advantages derivable from God's gift of ingenuity to man. And here the first thing apparent in our own country is, that the aristocracy have made a law, that no use shall be derived from it at all. They have determined by Act of Parliament, that men may invent as many machines as they think proper, but shall not be allowed to sell the produce; or which comes to the same thing, shall not be allowed to sell for what is wanted in return. The whole misery about machinery, every atom and fragment of suffering, alarm, and wretchedness directly or indirectly consequent thereon,-are the pure and necessary result of the gross fraud and half-witted idiotic cruelty perpetrated by the majority of the landlords upon the rest of their

* Article on Free Trade, No. XXIII.