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recent system of society, and the introduction of so great a benefit as the water-mill had all at once displaced the handgrinders, as the spinning machinery displaced the spinningwheel, what must become, it is said, of the one hundred and fifty men who earned the $75 a day, of which sum the consumer has now got $72 44 in his pocket? They must go to other work. And what is to set them to that work? The same $72 44; which, being saved in the price of flour, gives the poor man, as well as the rich man, more animal food and fuel; a greater quantity of clothes, and of a better quality, a better house than his hand-laboring ancestors used to have, much as his house might yet be improved; better furniture, and more of it; domestic utensils; and books. To produce these things there must be more laborers employed than before. The quantity of labor is, therefore, not diminished, while its productiveness is much increased. It is as if every man among us had become suddenly much stronger and more industrious. The machines labor for us, and are yet satisfied without either food or clothing. They increase all our comforts, and they consume none themselves. The hand-mills are not grinding, it is true: but the ships are sailing that bring us foreign produce; the looms are moving that give us more clothes; the potter, and glassmaker, and joiner are each employed to add to our household goods; we are each of us elevated in the scale of society; and all these things happen because machinery has diminished the cost of production.

The water-mill is, however, a simple machine compared with some mills of modern times. We are familiar with the village-mill. As we walk by the side of some gentle stream, we hear at a distance the murmur of water and the growl of wheels. We come upon the old mill, such as it has stood for successive generations. No laborer quarrels with the mill. It is an object almost of his love, for he knows that

it cheapens his food. It seems a part of the natural scenery amid which he has been reared.

But let a more efficient machine for grinding corn be introduced into Great Britain, as is in operation at Rochester, or Pittsburg, and the English peasant would think that the working millers would be ruined. And yet the mills at

Rochester or Pittsburg make flour cheaper in England through that competition there which forces onward improvement in mill machinery; and by increasing the consumption of flour calls into action more superintending labor for its production. One particular mill at Pittsburg produces 500 barrels of flour per day, each containing 196 pounds, and employs the services of forty persons. It produces cheap flour by saving labor in all its processes. It stands on the bank of a navigable river-a high building into which the corn for grinding must be removed from boats alongside. Is the grain necessary to produce these

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500 barrels of flour per day, amounting to 98,000 pounds, carried by man's labor to the topmost floor of that high mill? It is raised by an elevator consisting of an endless band, to which are fixed a series of metal cans revolving in a long wooden trough, which is lowered through the respective hatchways into the boats, and is connected at its upper end with the building where its belt is driven. The lower end of the trough is open, and as the endless band revolves, six or eight men shovel the grain into the ascending cans, which raise it so rapidly that 4000 bushels can be lifted and deposited in the mill in an hour. The drudging and unskilled laborers who would have toiled in carrying up the grain are free to do some skilled labor, of which the amount required is constantly increasing; and the cost saved by the elevator goes toward the great universal fund, out of which more labor and better labor are to find the means of employment.

CHAPTER XIII.

PRESENT AND FORMER CONDITION OF ENGLAND.-PROGRESS OF CULTIVATION.-EVIL INFLUENCE OF FEUDALISM.-STATE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. -MODERN IMPROVEMENTS.-CULTIVATION.-AVERAGE CONSUMPTION OF WHEAT IN GREAT BRITAIN.-IMPLEMENTS OF AGRICULTURE NOW IN USE.-NUMBER OF

AGRICULTURALISTS IN GREAT BRITAIN.

It is the remark of English tourists, as they travel from the sea-coast to London, that the country is a garden. It has taken nineteen centuries to make it such a garden. The marshes in which the legions of Julius Cæsar had to fight, up to their loins, with the Britons, to whom these swamps were habitual, are now drained. The dense woods in which the Druids worshiped are now cleared. Populous towns and cheerful vilages offer themselves on every side. Wherever the eye reaches, there is cultivation. Instead of a few scattered families painfully earning a subsistence by the chase, or by tilling the land without the knowledge and the instruments that science has given to the aid of manual labor-that cultivation is carried on with a systematic routine that improves the fertility of a good season, and diminishes the evils of a bad. Instead of the country being divided among hostile tribes, who have little communication, the whole territory is covered with a network of roads, and canals, and navigable rivers, and rail-roads, through which means there is a universal market, and wherever there is demand there is instant supply. Rightly considered, there is no branch of production which has so largely benefitted by the power of knowledge as that of

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agriculture. It was ages before the great physical changes were accomplished which are now beheld on every side; and England is still in a state of progress toward the perfection of those results which an over-ruling Providence had in store for the human race, in the gradual manifestation of those discoveries which have already so changed our condition and the condition of the world.

The history of cultivation in Great Britain is full of instruction as regards the inefficiency of mere traditional practice and the slowness with which scientific improvement establishes its dominion. It is no part of our plan to follow out this history; but a few scattered facts may not be without their value.

The oppressions of tenants that were perpetrated under the feudal system, when ignorant lords of manors impeded production by every species of extortion, may be estimated by one or two circumstances. There can be no doubt that the prosperity of a tenant is the best security for the landlord's due share of the produce of the land. Without manure, in some form or other, the land can not be fertilized; the landlords knew this, but they required to have a monopoly of the fertility. Their tenants kept a few sheep, but the landlords reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of having a sheepfold; so that the little tenants could not fold their own sheep on their own lands, but were obliged to let them be folded with those of their lord, or pay a fine. The flour-mill was the exclusive property of the manorial lord, whether lay or ecclesiastical; and whatever the distance, or however bad the road, the tenant could grind nowhere but at the lord's mill. No doubt the rent of land was exceedingly low, and the lord was obliged to maintain himself and his dependents by adding something considerable to his means by many forms of legalized extortion. The rent of land was so low because the produce was