woods, and distant range of hills. A neat refectory is fitted up within the works, where any of the work-people, who choose, may have a comfortable pint of hot tea or coffee, including sugar and milk, for one halfpenny.. The persons who regularly join in this refreshment, become entitled to medical attendance gratis."

A dancing-room for the recreation of the young is also provided. Dr. Ure says, "What I have myself witnessed at several times, both on Sundays and working days, has convinced me that the population of Belper is, in reference to health, domestic comfort, and religious culture, in a truly enviable state, compared with the average of our agricultural villages. The factory rooms are well aired, and as clean as any gentleman's parlour. The children are well complexioned, and work with cheerful dexterity at their respective occupations. Not one of Messrs. Strutt's work-people at Belper was attacked with cholera, while the neighbouring handicraft people and farmers were falling victims to the pestilence."

Mr. Kempton, a respectable manufacturer in New England, assured our central board, that factory labour for twelve or fourteen hours is not found to be injurious to the health or growth of the children of ten years of age and upwards in the States, because they are well fed, their board being paid out of their wages by the proprietors-an excellent practice, which would not, however, be permitted by the pauper parents in England, who live too much upon their children's earnings. In their manufacturing districts, principally in New England, upwards of 4000 children are employed under twelve years of age.

The evidence collected in England proves, that under such a diet as the wages could afford, the young inmates of our factories would thrive equally well with the American. And as to the charge which has been made of the injury done to their constitutions by entering a factory in early life, the following refutation of it is most decisive. There is one thing I feel convinced of from observation that young persons, especially females, who have begun mill-work at from ten to twelve, independently of their becoming much more expert artists, preserve their health better, and possess sounder feet and legs at twenty-five, than those who have commenced from thirteen to sixteen and upwards.

I have drawn freely upon Dr. Ure, as a fund of genuine information.

It appears that the artisans of the United States are treated on this principle; and they are accordingly declared to be more moral than the agricultural population. "At our establishment," says our authority, Mr. Kempton, "the proprietors, deeply sensible

of the value of religious nurture, paid the greater part of the minister's salary after building a meeting-house; and they frequently officiated themselves at the evening meetings, which were well attended. We would not keep any workers that would drink spirits, nor did they at other establishments. Almost all of them belong to the temperance societies. In the New England states, no man will get employment who is known to drink to excess. In America, the employer is viewed rather as a tradesman to whom the workpeople dispose of their labour, than as a person having a hostile interest. The manufacturers are always anxious that the children should be well educated, as they find them so much the more useful and trustworthy. "I hope the mother country," says Dr. Ure," will not disdain to take a word of advice from her meritorious daughter, and that the mill owners of Old England will study to discourage, by the effectual means above mentioned, the sin of drunkenness, the peculiar opprobrium of our people both at home and abroad. There are no jealousies between the American workmen and their employers, of the nature of those which appear to prevail between the English workman and his master."

BELPER.

The rapid improvements, made in almost every branch of the manufactures of England, during the last sixty years, are not more conspicuous in the increased wealth of the nation at large, than in the rising eminence of those places which before were hardly known. The most populous of the present manufacturing towns in Great Britain, were, at the beginning of the last century, either of little importance or not known at all. Such was Belper, which now holds a high rank in point of population among the towns in Derbyshire: it was, prior to 1776, as low in population as it was backward in civility; and considered as the insignificant residence of a few uncivilised nailers. In the year 1801, the population of Belper amounted to 4,500, and in 1809, to 5,635. This increase is owing to the extensive cotton mills erected there, belonging to the Messrs. Strutt; where in 1811, 1,300 persons found employThese mills are four in number, the first of which was erected in 1776 by Jedediah Strutt, and rebuilt in 1810. With its increase in extent and population, Belper has increased in civilisation and respectability. Immorality and ignorance, which were once thought the characteristics of the place, have, in a great _measure, disappeared; and improved morals and more enlarged views, supply their places. About the centre of the town, is the

mansion of Jedediah Strutt, and a little above the bridge, pleasantly situated, is Bridge-Hill, the seat of G. B. Strutt. The wear above the bridge is well worth attention; and the fine expanse of water extending for a considerable way off the river, interspersed with islands covered with young trees, has a pleasing effect. A little to the north of the mills, is a handsome stone bridge of three arches, erected over the Derwent at the expense of the county. In 1811, four hundred children were taught at the Sunday-school, supported by Mr. Strutt; who, at that time, adopted several of the plans of education recommended by Lancaster.*

The principal mill, as seen in the print, is 200 feet long, 30 feet wide, and six stories high; and its floors being constructed of brick arches, and paved with brick, it is considered absolutely indestructible by fire, and therefore proof against the havoc of that dreadful element. This mill has three water-wheels attached to it; the largest one, which is used in floods only, is remarkable, as well for its magnitude, as for its singular construction. It is upwards of 40 feet long, and 18 feet in diameter. It being impossible to procure timber sufficiently large to form the axle, or shaft, of this wheel in the usual mode of structure, it is made circular and hollow, of a great number of pieces, hooped together like a cask; the shaft is between five and six feet in diameter. The other two, which are used when the water is at a common height, are composed principally of iron, and are remarkable for their simplicity, strength, and lightness of appearance. Their diameters are 21 feet 6 inches, and length 15 feet. Each shaft is of cast iron, and the arms which connect them with the sole, or that part of the wheel to which the buckles or ladles are attached, are simply round rods of wrought iron, an inch and a half in diameter. Each wheel has eight of these arms, and they are supported, in the direction of the shaft or axis, by eight diagonal rods of the above dimensions.

*"At the period of the discovery of America, 1492, the great mass of the common people of Europe were little better than slaves; of that which we call liberty, they scarcely knew the name. They had no absolute property in the land, and they were so wretchedly indigent, as to have little property of any kind. Their political privileges corresponded with this state of their property; they had no elections; officers from the highest to the lowest were placed over them. Those who then cultivated the earth, were: First slaves, these slaves were generally some portion of a conquered nation, white like ourselves. Second, villeins, who were said to be fixed to the soil, and were transferred with the land. Third, there were a small number of freemen who held property absolutely as their own. But such was the

There do not exist in America, in the same degree, those circumstances of a dense and degraded population which occasion, in the old nations of Europe, such an infinite difference of knowledge and ignorance, of wealth the most exuberant and indigence the most horrible.* No man in America need be poor if he has an axe and arms to use it. The wilderness is to him the same retreat which the world afforded to our first parents. His family, if he has one, is wealth; if he is unencumbered with wife or children, he is the more easily provided for. An immense proportion of the population of the United States consists of agriculturists, who live upon their own property, which is generally of moderate extent, and cultivate it by their own labour. Such a situation is peculiarly favourable to republican habits. The man who feels himself really independent, and so must every American who can use a hoe or an axe,-will please himself with the mere exertion of his free will, and form a strong contrast to the hallooing, bawling, blustering rabble of a city, where a dram of liquor, or the money to buy a meal, is sure to purchase the acclamation

wretched condition, of the times, and such the violence and outrage to which men were exposed in those barbarous ages, that this latter class made a formal surrender of this independent property, and became slaves, that they might enjoy the protection of the lords. The first dawn of liberty arose from the fact that many of the slave peasants were enabled, by their economy and wise savings, to purchase their liberty. As their property procured them liberty, liberty made them profitable labourers to their former masters, whose revenues were thereby so much augmented, and the value of their lands so much increased, and so many saw the advantages accruing to themselves from the liberty of their slaves, that innumerable serfs were every where enfranchised. It is related by Robertson, that in the progress of time and of public improvement, charters of manumission were granted. These concessions were first, that the right of sale of the person should be relinquished; second, power was given to convey property by will or deed; third, the taxes and services, which before were at the will of the lord, were now rendered certain and fixed; fourth, marriage was allowed without the lord's permission. Little do we think of the condition of our English ancestors, when we look back to the period long after the discovery of this continent, and find Queen Elizabeth, in 1574, granting manumissions to certain slaves of her own. The labouring people were governed and legislated for more like animals than human beings; what they should eat, what they should wear, and what they should earn, being prescribed by law. Even the dress of merchants and artificers, who were inferior to the lords and landholders, was provided for by law."-Sedgwick.

* As you walk along our streams you may hear the merry notes of the bell mingling with the sounds of our water-falls, calling not the lazy, lounging monastic, to yawn over his matins; but the vigorous and active mechanic to the conduct of the spindle and loom.

of thousands, whose situation in the scale of society is too low to permit their thinking of their political right as a thing more valuable than to be bartered against the degree of advantage they may procure, or of license which they may exercise, by placing it at the disposal of one candidate or another.*

*Extracts from the Prospectus of the Emporium, a periodical work edited by Judge Cooper, of Pennsylvania, now President of Columbia College, in South Carolina.

"Our agriculturists want a home market. Manufactures would supply it. Agriculture, at a great distance from seaports, languishes for want of this. Great Britain exhibits an instance of unexampled power and wealth by means of an agriculture greatly dependent on a system of manufactures— and her agriculture, thus situated, is the best in the world, though still capable of great improvement.

"We are too much dependent upon Great Britain for articles that habit has converted into necessaries. A state of war demands privations that a large portion of our citizens reluctantly submit to. Home manufactures would greatly lessen the evil.

"By means of debts incurred for foreign manufactures, we are almost again become colonists-we are too much under the influence, indirectly, of British merchants and British agents. We are not an independent people. Manufactures among us would tend to correct this, and give a stronger tone of nationality at home. I greatly value the intercourse with that country of pre-eminent knowledge and energy; but our dependence upon it is often so great, as to be oppressive to ourselves.

"The state of agriculture would improve with the improvement of manufactures, by means of the general spirit of energy and exertion, which no where exists in so high a degree as in a manufacturing country; and by the general improvement of machinery, and the demand for raw materials.

"The home trade, consisting in the exchange of agricultural surpluses for articles of manufacture, produced in our own country, will, for a long time to come, furnish the safest and the least dangerous, the least expensive and the least immoral-the most productive and the most patriotic employment of surplus capital, however raised and accumulated. The safest, because it requires no navies exclusively for its protection; the least dangerous, because it furnishes no excitement for the prevailing madness of commercial wars; the least expensive, for the same reason that it is the safest and the least dangerous; the least immoral, because it furnishes no temptation to the breach or evasion of the laws; to the multiplication of oaths and perjuries; and to the consequent prostration of all religious feeling, and all social duty; the most productive, because the capital admits of quicker return; because the whole of the capital is permanently invested and employed at home; because it contributes, directly, immediately, and wholly, to the internal wealth and resources of the nation; because the credits given are more easily watched and more effectually protected by our own laws, well known, easily resorted to, and speedily executed, than if exposed in distant and in foreign countries, controlled by foreign laws, and foreign customs, and at the mercy of foreign agents; the most patriotic,