“With the manufacturing labouring classes similar effects occur at opposite periods, when the necessaries of life are pressed to the highest point: they are introduced, _in the years of ruinous cheapness_, to habits of comparative luxury and consumption which their labour cannot, on an average, command; and they, therefore, feel much more the want occasioned by extreme high prices, when they cannot command so much as their labour should produce to them. So the effect is, that _in cheap years his labour commands too much agricultural labour_, and he thus anticipates a part of what should be the consumption of a future day; and in dear years his labour commands too little agricultural labour, and he is obliged to receive proportionably as much too little as before he received too much.” We are decidedly of opinion that there is much sound sense in the above extract. We never have known a year so characterised by _ruinous cheapness_ of all kinds of provisions as that which has just gone by; the present year holds out no prospect of improvement, but rather indicates a farther decline; and therefore we are not without hope that this important point may be worked out at greater length in the columns of the _Economist_. The question of wages has led us into a slight digression. Our immediate topic was the dependence of the manufacturers, or at least a large section of them, upon the purchase power of the community; and we have already shown, by the evidence of our opponents, that, in so far as the agriculturists are concerned, their aggregate produce, which constitutes their means, has been diminished by one-third. Now, it must be remembered that _the cost of production_ falls to be deducted altogether from the remaining two-thirds; and that, in the lost third was contained the greater part of the surplusage or profit, which afforded the means of commanding luxuries and superfluities. Of course any diminished power of purchase must tell against the manufacturers, by keeping up their stocks in hand, and lessening the necessity for production. But many of them, failing the home trade, have the chance of a market, though it may be a less profitable one, elsewhere. They can export on consignation if not on order; and late accounts from San Francisco, where bales of British goods are stated to be lying unwarehoused, and exposed to the weather without finding purchasers, show that the export mania may be carried beyond the verge of average recklessness. But the shopkeepers and tradesmen have no such alternative resource. They depend solely upon the consumers of Britain, and any material lowering of the value of home produce reacts upon them in the shape of lessened demand for all articles of luxury in which they deal, and upon the artisan in the form of diminished employment. It may be useful to lay before our readers Mr Spackman’s estimate of the total productions of this country, calculated