%417. Condition of the Workingman%.--Every class of society was benefited by these improvements, but no man more so than those who depended on their daily wages for their daily bread. Though wages increased but little, they were more easily earned and brought richer returns. Improved means of transportation, cheaper methods of manufacture, enabled every laborer in 1860 to wear better clothes and eat better food than had been worn or consumed by his father in 1830. New industries, new trades and occupations, new needs in the business world, afforded to his son and daughter opportunities for a livelihood unknown in his youth, while the free school system enabled them to fit themselves to use such opportunities without cost to him. When our country became independent, and for fifty years afterwards, a working day was from sunrise to sunset, with an hour for breakfast and another for dinner. After manufactures arose, and mills and factories gave employment to thousands of wage earners, fourteen, fifteen, and even sixteen hours of labor were counted a day. Protests were early made against this, and demands raised that a working day should be ten hours. At last, late in the thirties, the ten hours system was adopted in Baltimore, and in 1840, by order of President Van Buren, was put in force at the navy yard in Washington and in "all public establishments" under the Federal government. Thus established, the system spread slowly, till to-day it exists almost everywhere. Indeed, in many states, and in all departments of the Federal government, eight hours of work constitute a day. Thus, by the aid of machinery, not only are articles, formerly expensive, made so cheaply that poor men can afford to use them, but the wage earners who operate the machinery can make these articles so quickly that they to-day earn higher wages for fewer hours of work than ever before in the history of the world. Not only did wages increase and the hours of labor grow shorter between 1840 and 1860, but the field of labor was enormously expanded. In 1810, when the first census of manufactures in the United States was taken, the value of goods manufactured was $173,000,000. In 1860 it was ten times as great, and gave employment to more than 1,000,000 men and women.