by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a nuisance every such mill, engine, etc.  As this mulct would have made a serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial assemblies to each new incumbent—­in Virginia regularly L500, doubled in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons—­we are prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing.  Under a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight fell upon all other branches of manufacture.  Among these, wool, flax, paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as interfering with “the trade, navigation and manufactures” of the mother-country.  An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to another.

That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any headway in this field, is no matter of surprise.  Thirty years elapsed before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable.  In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471.  This embraces every fruit of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk dress.  We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the population.  In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, “black” and white, the yield of our factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442.  They employed 2,053,996 operatives.  Of these, the average wages were $377, against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly.  The advance in the product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress of the people in comfort and luxury.  It reached a value of one hundred and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or twenty-eight pounds a head.  This exemplification is but one in an endless list.

Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports.  They exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years from 1815 to 1824.  But the multiplication of the wants of a people rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans.  They have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of late.  The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have usually done of improvements.  Not only do the British screw-steamers take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but