street-sweeping machines into a
large town district, threw suddenly out of
employment the whole class of sweepers by
hand-broom. They were men living by
labour of the lowest class, deprived of which,
it was to be expected that they would fall
into destitution. Inquiry was made after
them, individually, and it was found that,
except a natural proportion of them who had
died, and six in the hundred of whom no
information could be had, all had found other
work, and, on the whole, work of a more
profitable kind. Driven to exert themselves,
the greater number had become qualified for
offices which had before seemed to lie above
their sphere; they were changed into stokers
or firemen, machine-drivers, policemen, and
so forth.

Over-production is sometimes alleged as a
consequence of the extension of machinery.
It was alleged against the stocking manufacture
at a period of depression in the trade,
though at that time all the stockings made
in a year would not have provided more than
one to each foot in the nation. While half
the population is in rags, there can be no
reason to complain of the too free manufacture
of fit clothing, if increased production
be attended with increase of cheapness
in the thing required, as well as an
increase of wealth among the people who
require it.

And, here, again, let us return to the fact
that the labour which alone is superseded by
machinery, is that which is worst paid, and
that the steam-engine does not crush down a
bad market without building up a better for
the labourer. Even machines that are called
especially self-acting, require a directing mind
to turn them to the best advantage for their
owner. A self-acting mule may be worked
by a young person at nine or ten shillings
a-week; but it is found better worth while
to place it under the superintendence of a
more experienced workman, and to pay him
eighteen shillings. When men work with a
will, machines do more than they can when
the men want energy; and it is true in
machine-labour as in handicraft that the
high-priced English workman is, so to speak,
a cheaper article than the low-priced labourer
of other countries. A cotton manufacturer
in Austria declares that with the
newest and best English machinery, thirteen
hours a-day of labour from the Austrian
hands does not produce more than would be
turned off by the same number of men in
Manchester in ten hours and a-half.

Manufacturers of Alsace, Belgium, and
other countries, bear like witness. In the
Crimea it was found that it would be cheaper
to take out highly-paid English labourers
than to employ Croats living on the spot at
sixpence a-day: the Turkish labourers, however,
were far abler workmen than the
Croats. Members of the late Brussels Congress
compared notes with one another on
this subject. One of them, a merchant, declared
that he had had ships built abroad,
and repaired in every principal port in the
world, and found that notwithstanding the
high wages of English shipwrights, labour
proved to be as cheap in England as in any
other country. Another member of the
Congress, a landowner in Poland, who has
spent some years in England studying our
agriculture, said that he found one German
labourer to be equal to two Polish labourers,
but that it required three Polish labourers —
and those not serfs— to do the average day's
work of an Englishman. Other persons
could corroborate this testimony. On a
special comparison being made in Normandy,
it was found that the work of three Norman
agricultural labourers was equal only to that
of two Kentish men; and English workmen
exceed in power, according to the same proportion,
Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes.
In Calcutta, it has been found worth while
to pay Hindoos to hold umbrellas over
artisans imported at high wages from Lancashire.
The wages of the labourer, taken
alone, are therefore a very insufficient standard
of the cost of labour. A Lancashire
navvy working on the railways of the
continent will earn sometimes double the
best wages of the German or French workmen
around him. He will do the same
when imported into English districts occupied
by a class of under-paid and ill-fed
labourers. The day's work is finished before
noon.

A foreman accustomed to see good labour
done at piece-work was set over the works
of an estate in Dorsetshire.

"You will get this work done cheaply," it
was said to him, "when labourers are to be
had at eight shillings a-week."

"They would be dear," he replied, "at
six."

Dorsetshire bricklayers, underfed upon
twelve shillings a-week, will lay between
three and four hundred bricks a-day; the
town bricklayer, at twice the wages, does
three times the work.

Thus, we find that there is developed a
new source of increased production by every
advance in the use of machinery which
creates well-paid service and increases the
number of well-nourished men. "I cannot,"
said a successful manufacturer, "afford to
work my machine with a horse that costs
less than thirty pounds, or eats less than
eighteen pounds of oats a-day." As it is
with horses, so it is with men. Work is for
quantity as cheap in farming districts where
a man's labour costs fourteen or sixteen
shillings a-week, as where it costs eight or
nine shillings only. The Lancashire navvies
work in gangs of five, and admit none among
their number who cannot load twenty horse-loads
of earth in a day. These men, at from
three shillings to five-and-sixpence a-day
wages, have been found to produce cheaper