These people, considering all the hardships in the life of factory employees, are likely to hold and often to express the opinion that the highest welfare of the human race really demands a return to the simpler life of early days, when a much larger proportion of the people lived upon farms, producing their own provisions, raising the flax and the wool wherewith they clothed themselves, quite independently of the wealthy classes, whether bankers, capitalists, or manufacturers, the factory as we know it to─day having hardly begun its marvelous era of existence. Let us consider for a moment how all this has come about. In the earlier years of the independence of this country, the chief dependence was upon the results of agricultural work. In due time the development of the resources of the country has placed manufacturers at the front, so that in very recent years the value of manufactured products has become nearly double that of agricultural. These results, like many others of a less notable character, commenced from very small beginnings; and it has been by inborn mechanical ability, remarkable ingenuity, patient development, and tireless energy, that mechanical undertakings have been developed from meager initial facilities, until, in the vast manufacturing enterprises of the present day, the American mechanic in nearly all lines leads the world in originality and practical achievement. =Early New England Mechanics.= When the early settlers of New England labored under the restrictive and harassing laws of the Mother Country, and under their administration were goaded and exasperated beyond endurance in many ways, not the least of which was that of being obliged to purchase many manufactured articles from England at extortionate prices──or, if purchased from other countries, still paying taxes to England for the privilege──they rebelled. Determining to buy no more foreign goods, they set out, at first in most clumsy and primitive fashion, to make for themselves such articles as were really necessaries, and, in noble self─denial, to live without those which they could not make for themselves. They doubtless little realized, however, that they were thereby laying the foundations of the greatest manufacturing country in the world. By the principles thus inaugurated, they instituted the first industrial _boycott_ in the history of the country──the one that has had more important and far─reaching influences than anything of the kind before or since.