"The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones," as Shakspere describes the country lasses of his day, had to _change_ their employment; but there was far more employment for the makers of stockings, for then every one began to wear stockings. The hosiery manufacture furnishes employment to many persons besides those who work at the stocking-machine. The frame-worker, in many cases, makes the knit-work in a piece adapted for a stocking, and does not make a finished stocking; the seamer makes the stocking out of the piece so produced. When we speak of the stocking-frame, we speak of a machine which knits every article of hosiery. In this manufacture there were employed, in 1851, sixty-five thousand five hundred persons, of whom thirty thousand were females. Suppose that the ignorance and prejudice which prevailed at the time of James I. upon the subject of machinery had continued to the present day; and that not only the first stocking-frame of William Lee had never been used, but that all machines employed in the manufacture of hosiery had never been thought of; and they could not have been thought of if the first machines had been put down. The greater number of us, in that case, would have been without stockings. But there would have been a greater evil than even this. We might all have found substitutes for stockings, or have gone without them. But the progress of ingenuity would have been stopped. The inventive principle would have been destroyed.