Mr Escot. I regret that time did not allow us to see the caves on the sea-shore.  There is one of which the depth is said to be unknown.  There is a tradition in the country, that an adventurous fiddler once resolved to explore it; that he entered, and never returned; but that the subterranean sound of a fiddle was heard at a farm-house seven miles inland.  It is, therefore, concluded that he lost his way in the labyrinth of caverns, supposed to exist under the rocky soil of this part of the country.

Mr Jenkison. A supposition that must always remain in force, unless a second fiddler, equally adventurous and more successful, should return with an accurate report of the true state of the fact.

Mr Foster. What think you of the little colony we have just been inspecting; a city, as it were, in its cradle?

Mr Escot. With all the weakness of infancy, and all the vices of maturer age.  I confess, the sight of those manufactories, which have suddenly sprung up, like fungous excrescences, in the bosom of these wild and desolate scenes, impressed me with as much horror and amazement as the sudden appearance of the stocking manufactory struck into the mind of Rousseau, when, in a lonely valley of the Alps, he had just congratulated himself on finding a spot where man had never been.

Mr Foster. The manufacturing system is not yet purified from some evils which necessarily attend it, but which I conceive are greatly overbalanced by their concomitant advantages.  Contemplate the vast sum of human industry to which this system so essentially contributes:  seas covered with vessels, ports resounding with life, profound researches, scientific inventions, complicated mechanism, canals carried over deep valleys, and through the bosoms of hills:  employment and existence thus given to innumerable families, and the multiplied comforts and conveniences of life diffused over the whole community.

Mr Escot. You present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and require me to admire it.  Seas covered with vessels:  every one of which contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves, ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief.  Ports resounding with life:  in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution.  Profound researches, scientific inventions:  to what end?  To contract the sum of human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate independence, liberty, and health?  No; to multiply factitious desires, to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent unnatural wants, to heap up incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish and ruinous profusion.  Complicated machinery:  behold its blessings.  Twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sate the good woman with her spinning-wheel:  the children, if not more profitably employed than in gathering heath and sticks, at least