"So it is with everything," answered Mr. Beauchamp; "no single image or impression gives us great pleasure. It is in their combination that our engagement dwells. Single ideas are but straight lines, blank plains, monotonous patches of colour. Associate them with other shapes and hues, and you produce beauty and pleasure. Thus with the manufacturing towns; if I only went to see a steam-engine work, a shuttle play, or a spindle turn, I should soon be tired enough; but when in all that I see there, I perceive a new development of man's mind, a fresh course opened for his energies when old ones are exhausted, when I behold the commencement of a great social change, which shall convert the pursuits of tribes and nations from agricultural to manufacturing--we rather shall throw the great mass of human industry, for which its former sphere was too small, into another and almost interminable channel, I feel that I am a spectator of a great social phenomenon, as awful and as grand as the lightning that rends the pine, or the earthquake that overthrows the mountain. It is magnificent, yet terrible; beautiful, but still sad." "Why sad?" demanded Ned Hayward. "I have considered the matter in the same light a little, and have talked with various grave manufacturers about it; but they all seem to see nothing in it but what is very fine and pleasant. They have no apprehension for the result, or doubts about its doing a great deal of good to every body in the end." "The end!" said Beauchamp, "where is the end? What will the end be? They see nothing but good; they augur nothing but good, because they are actively employed in that one particular course, and buoyed up with those sanguine expectations which active exertion always produces. Neither do I doubt that the end will be good; but still ere that end be reached, how much misery, how much strife, how much evil, must be encountered. One needs but to set one's foot in a factory, ay, or in a manufacturing town, to see that the evil not only will be, but is; that we are wading into a dark stream which we must pass over, and are already knee deep. I speak not of the evils inseparable from the working of any great change in the relations of society or in its objects. As we can never climb a hill without some fatigue, so we can never reach a higher point in social advance without some suffering, but that inevitable evil I look upon as light, compared with many other things before us. I doubt not that in God's good providence new resources will be ever opened before mankind for the employment of human industry; but when I see even a temporary superfluity of labour, I tremble to think of what vast power of grinding and oppressing that very circumstance places in the hands of the employer. Combine that power with the state of men's minds at present, and all the tendencies of the age; remember that to accumulate wealth, to rival others in luxury and display, to acquire at any price and by any means, is a