The manufacturing progress of this country has depended, in a great degree, on the facility possessed of making machinery of all kinds by the aid of powerful engines worked by steam power. These engines, most of which appear to be self-acting, forge and roll and cut and bore beams of iron, boiler plates, and cylinders of immense size, which it would be impossible to make by hand; and they do the work with a rapidity and mechanical accuracy that would be otherwise unattainable. In the progress of manufacturing invention, the small steam engine first made by manual labour created the power to make other steam engines of large size; and those more powerful engines supplied the means of making still larger shafts and cylinders for engines that were to be employed in the construction of machines of various kinds, to be worked by the power thus accumulated. The important advantages derived from the invention and application of self-acting machinery, not only by the community at large, but even by the workmen whose labour they for a time superseded, were forcibly stated by Mr. Whitworth, in his opening address at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, in September, 1856:--"I congratulate you," he observed, "on the success which in our time the mechanical arts have obtained, and the high consideration in which they are held. Inventors are not now persecuted, as formerly, by those who fancied that their inventions and discoveries were prejudicial to the general interest, and calculated to deprive labour of its fair reward. Some of us are old enough to remember the hostility manifested to the working of the power-loom, the self-acting mule, the machinery for shearing woollen cloth, the thrashing machine, and many others. Now the introduction of reaping and mowing machines, and other improved agricultural machinery, is not opposed. Indeed, it must be obvious, to reflecting minds, that the increased luxuries and comforts which all more or less enjoy, are derived from the numerous recent mechanical appliances and the productions of our manufactories. That of our cotton has increased during the last few years in a wonderful degree. In 1824, a gentleman with whom I am acquainted sold on one occasion 100,000 pieces of 74-reed printing cloth at 30s. 6d. per piece of 29 yards long; the same description of cloth he sold last week at 3s. 9d. One of the most striking instances I know of the vast superiority of machinery over simple instruments used by hand, is in the manufacture of lace, when one man, with a machine, does the work of 8,000 lace makers on the cushion. In spinning fine numbers of yarn, a workman in a self-acting mule will do the work of 3,000 hand-spinners with the distaff and spindle.