“Capital is made to grow by adding to it as much as can be spared of the profit it brings. We all know that if a hundred pounds bring in five pounds’ interest at the year’s end, and if two of the five pounds only are spent, the capital of the next year will be a hundred and three pounds, and the interest five pounds, three shillings; and so on, increasing every year. This is the way capital grows by saving. Labour does not grow by saving in like manner; but methods of improving and economizing it have been found, and more are invented every year. Labour is saved by machinery, when a machine either does what man cannot do so well, or when it does in a shorter time, or at a less expense, the work which man can do equally well in other respects. This last was the case with our new machinery. It did not, like the furnaces and rollers, do what man could not do; but it did in a quicker and cheaper manner what man had hitherto done. It was a saving of labour; and as all saving of labour is a good thing, our machinery was a good thing. “You wish to interrupt me, I see. You wish to say that though it is a good thing for us capitalists, it is not for you labourers. Hear me while I show you the truth. If we could have brought back the state of the world to what it was four years ago; if we could have made the foreign iron-works melt into air, and some nearer home sink into the ground; if we could have made the demand what it once was, and have raised the prices to the highest ever known, you would not have cared whether we put up machinery or not, because there would have been employment enough for everybody notwithstanding. You care for it now because it throws some people out of work; but you should remember, that it has also kept many busy who must be idle, now that it is destroyed. We should be as glad as you if there was work enough for all the men and all the machinery together that our concern could contain; but when changes which we could not prevent or repair brought before us the question whether we should employ two-thirds of our people with machinery, or none without, we saw it to be for the interest of all to set up our new labourers in the midst of the grumblings of the old. We tell you plainly that we could not have employed any of you for the last six months, but for the saving caused by the new machinery; and that, now it is gone, we can employ none of you any longer.