This competition has had the effect of improving the homemade article: but still it is easier to bawl for prohibiting duties than to beat the foreign workmen out of the market. An intelligent cordwainer, named James Devlin, an experienced workman of a literary turn, has put forth a little book on the boot and shoe trade of France, recommending to his brethren of the craft the adoption of the French method, which he describes with technical minuteness, and denouncing in his strictures on the character of English upper-leathers, the hurried and careless process of the tanner and currier. What Mr. Devlin says on the subject of leather, accounts for the difference between a French boot that draws on like a glove, and an ordinary English one that confines the foot as in a vice, and hangs about the leg like a clog. If we look to the nature of our leather, excepting that used for the soles, we shall find the article not so good as that which the French bootmaker can purchase, and what, still more pertinent to the matter is, that formerly it was not so; confident I am, however, that a change might be obtained, as well from the nature of our raw hides and skins themselves, as from the ability of the working currier; and, in proof of this, let me instance the superior quality of our own jockey, or topboot legs--so clear, so soft, and workable--so handsomely grained, and so exquisitely drated. No country can equal the British currier in this particular, nor in the white leather, for the tops of these boots; why his inferiority in other articles? The reason is obvious: England, if not now, was at least some years ago, the only jockey-boot nation _par excellence_; and hence, so far our superiority: the competition among us being so extensive as to urge to the highest progressive perfection; and that perfection always meeting its proper reward in the greater commands for orders. Another fact to be attended to, is that in the boot department, we have an inferior manner of blocking, or the turning the front piece of our Wellington boot; in this we are far behind our neighbors.