A short view of each of these
particulars will, we believe, sufficiently account for the present
unparalleled state of British manufactures and commerce.
The direct effect of improvement in the mode of manufacturing any article,
by the introduction of a more powerful machinery, is to encrease the
quantity, and to lower the price of that article. Hence it follows, that
those who manufacture it on the old plan must be undersold, unless they
also adopt such machinery; and as knowledge, both speculative and
practical, has greater chance to improve in proportion as it is spread,
from this cause, as well as from the more powerful cause of rival
interests, wherever improvements in manufactures have begun and been
extended, they are sure to advance.
That this is not theoretical doctrine requires only an appeal to what has
been effected, and is yet effecting in Britain, to prove. A very curious,
interesting, and instructive work might be written on the improvements in
the cotton machinery alone, which have been made in this country during the
last forty years: we mean interesting and instructive, not merely on
account of the tacts relative to mechanical ingenuity which it would
unfold, but on account of the much higher history which it would give of
the mechanism of the human mind, and of the connections and ramifications
of the various branches of human knowledge.
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