To satisfy my mind on this subject, I have looked into such books as I have had time and opportunity to consult, and have found evidence of the fact, that, the more we increase our facilities for performing work with speed and cheapness, the more we shall have to do, and so the more hands will be required to do it. The time was when it was considered so great an undertaking for a man to farm a hundred acres, that very few persons were found cultivating a larger tract. But now, with every farming process facilitated by the use of labor-saving machines, there are farms of ten thousand acres better managed than were formerly those of only a hundred acres. There would be no penny paper brought daily to our door, unless the same wonderful revolution had been made in all the processes of the paper-mill, and in the speed of printing-presses. If I had doubted what was to be the consequence of bringing machinery into competition with the sewing-women, it was owing to my utter ignorance of how other great revolutions had affected the labor of different classes of workers. This doubt thus satisfactorily resolved, it very soon became with me a question for profound wonder, what became of the immensely increased quantity of clothing which was manufactured by so many thousands of machines. I could not learn that our population had suddenly increased to an extent sufficient to account for the enlarged consumption that was evidently taking place. I had heard that there were nations of savages who considered shirts a sort of superfluity, and who moved about in very much the same costume as that in which our primal mother clothed herself just previously to indulging in the forbidden fruit. But they could not have thus suddenly taken to the wearing of machine-made shirts. There was a paragraph also in our paper which stated that the usual dress in hot weather, in some parts of our own South, was only a hat and spurs. This, however, I regarded as a piece of raillery, and was not inclined to place much faith in it. But I had never heard that any other portion of our people were in the habit of going without shirts or pantaloons. If such had been the practice, and if it had on the instant been renounced, it would have accounted for the sudden and unprecedented demand which now sprang up for these indispensable articles of dress. Or if the fashion had so changed that men had taken to wearing two shirts instead of one, that also might account for it,--though the wearing of two would be considered as great an eccentricity as the wearing of none.