The value of the woollen manufactured articles of Great Britain alone now exceeds 20,000,000_l._ a year; and the manufacture employs 500,000 persons:—and these, not spinning and weaving, with all imaginable awkwardness and toil, just enough for their own families, but producing with rapidity and ease finished fabrics with which to supply not only the multitudes of their own country, but the Russian boors in their winter dwellings, the Greek maidens on the shores of their islands, the boatmen of the Nile, the dancing girls of Ceylon, the negro slaves of Jamaica, the fishermen of Java and the peasantry of Hayti, the sunburnt Peruvian when he goes out defended against the chilly dews of the evening, and the half-frozen Siberian when he ventures to face the icy wind for the sake of the faint gleams of noon. Our looms and mills are at work in Prussian villages and beside Saxon streams. The Turk meets the Frank on the Oder, to exchange the luxuries of the one for the comforts of the other. The merchants of the world meet at the great fair of Leipsic, and thence drop the fabrics of European looms in every region through which they pass. There are shepherds on the wide plains of Van Diemen’s Land, and on the hills of the Western World, preparing employment and custom for the operative who sits at his loom at Leeds, and the spinner who little dreams from what remote parts gain will come to him at Bradford. And the market is only beginning to be opened yet. Besides the multitudes still to arise in the countries just named, there are innumerable tribes of Chinese, of Hindoos, of Persians, of dwellers in Africa and South America, who yet have to learn the comfort of woollen clothing. Will not the Greenlanders seek it too? And who needs it so much as the Esquimaux? All these will in time be customers, if we do but permit the commodity to be brought naturally within their reach. Would it have been right that all these should be sacrificed to the wishes of the little company of spinners by hand and treaders with the feet? Would not that little company and their children’s children have been sacrificed at the same time? In all other instances of the introduction of machinery, as in this, the interests of masters and men are identical. To make more with less cost is the true policy of the one, in order that it may bring the advantage of obtaining more with less cost to the other. That is, the utmost economy of labour and capital should be the common aim of both.