PARALYZED INDUSTRY. Ar the time when the people of the United States, under the influence of political delusions, are breaking to pieces the ingenious mechanism of their combined industry, it will not be uninteresting to briefly glance at the origin of its various parts. To those, at least, who are aware that the common appetites and impulses of man, by the industry which they excite, are the great causes of all progress, the history of the origin of the visible arts by which wants are gratified and progress is assured, is the most interesting of all histories. Even those who find the causes of such progress in political designs cannot look with indifference on the improvements in those arts by which the objects of the Statesman are attained. The United States is now in population superior to our home empire, and is consequently to be classed as the fourth, or, if we include China, as the fifth among civilized nations. In its case the origin of various arts, obscure, or utterly lost in darkness, in almost all other cases, is accurately known, and in them we can trace the growth of a great nation back to its very birth. In almost all other instances fabulous ages have been required to bring into existence that greatness which in America has been achieved within three centuries, and the bulk of which has actually grown up within the memory of living men; Lord Lyndhurst may recollect the time when the United States had not four millions of people. And in other known cases, to increase from such a number to thirty millions required ten, twelve, or twenty centuries. Our knowledge of the causes of this difference does not make it less extraordinary. Although we can trace minutely the progress of the material arts by which the rapid growth has been sustained, this rather increases than diminishes our interest in the phenomena. We see them all, from first to last. We have not to hunt for the founder of the nation, for the great law-giver who gave it form and order, for the principles of the design of which it is the realization, for there are none. Adventures in search of wealth, exiles escaping persecution, founding for themselves a new home in a vast wilderness, and tempting others to join them, welcoming the oppressed, and not unwilling to receive the degraded and the criminal-the refuse of old civilization overflowing, without a leader-into a new world, and by the mere force of their necessities, becoming, in an astonishingly short period, a great nation, is the epitome of their history. The origin and progress amongst them of the arts which they must have carried to considerable perfection in order to live, whether imported or native to the soil, has been well explained by Dr. J. Leander Bishop, in an admirable work, entitled "A History of American Manufactures, from 1608 to 1860," etc., to which we are indebted for many of our facts and dates. "King" Cotton, as it is now termed from its supposed power over. political affairs, was the spontaneous product over many parts of America, and was cultivated in "the old dominion," as the state of Virginia is familiarly called, at a very early period. It was used for inferior clothing, VOL. II. U and "Virginia cloth," made of cotton, and woven with great taste by the women in country parts, was much prized for the use of slaves. Bounties on linen exported from England checked the colonial industry, though were counteracted by restrictions on raw cotton imported from the West Indies and Brazils. Far from supplying all the rest of the world with cotton, America imported it till 1790. It had made, indeed, an attempt as early as 1770 to send some to Liverpool; but, as late as 1784, the quantity exported was so small that an American ship with eight bales on board was seized because it was supposed to be impossible by our customhouse that so much could be exported from America. In the year 1785, the first bag of cotton was exported from Charleston, a locality which possesses such attractions in its "yellow gals" that now-a-days every melodious admirer of Eithopian minstrelsy expresses his determination to be "off" to i, and which is just at present suffering no small share of the disagreeable vicissitudes which war brings in its train. About the year in question it began to be perceived that the United States "might become a great cotton producing country." The Birdens, or Bordens, of South Carolina, for the name is spelt both ways, imported the "black seed" from the Bahamas, the species of cotton which until the present fratricidal contest was the great article of export, and invented an improved roller gin for cleaning it. In 1793, the invention of the saw gin by Eli Whitney, who, like other ingenious men, was rather robbed than rewarded for his invention, gave great impulse to the growth of cotton in the States, and enabled them not only to dispense with a supply from the West Indies and the Brazils, but to undersell these countries in all other markets. From that time successive improvements in the operations for cleaning cotton, combined with the "splendid inventions in England for converting it into cloth," have promoted incessantly the cultivation of cotton in America. In 1859, the quantity exported from the States, according to their own statistics, was 1,386,461,562 lbs., valued at 152,000,000 dollars. The growth of manufacturing industry in England is, in fact, fully matched by the growth of cotton in the States. The two went together, and are equally parts of the combined industry, which unites nations, as well as individuals in one productive family. What a pity it is that the criminal ambition or petty caprice of any one or any number should be the means of casting the apple of discord in the midst of their fellowmen, and while severing with the sword a constitution cemented by the life's blood of their forefathers, be the means of shattering-perhaps irremediably-every feeling of international courtesy, harmony, and industrial progress! Were it possible to bring into one focus all the widely-scattered branches of the various arts employed about metals, and connect each of them with its commencement, we should find, in these arts also, extended and improved as they have been throughout the civilized world since America was peopled from Europe, a growth equal to that of the cotton mannfactures. The Americans, need we remark, are skilful workers in metals. They succeed equally in making hatchets and steam-engines; they have great natural advantages both in the nature of their metallic ores and in fuel; and no other disadvantage, if it be one, than a comparative high price for labour. They need fear no competition. It is, therefore, to be deeply regretted, that their legislature should have imitated the ignorant legislatures of Europe of the last century, and, in spite of Franklin, should have protected native industry at the vast cost or civic estrangement ending in civil war. The Americans were continually outraged for years, and at length driven to separation by restrictions on their industry, imposed by the mother country, and yet they have now blindly and ignorantly inflicted on themselves the evils against which they justly rebelled. The first vessel, larger than a row-boat, ever built in the United States, was the work of a Dutchman, Captain Andrien Block, at Manhattan river, New York, in 1614. She was called the "Ornest," and was but of sixteen tons burden. It was not until the year 1624 that ship-building began at Plymouth, and now the tonnage of the United States is as large as that of Great Britain, and their sailing, if not their steam vessels, are equal to the finest built in England, or elsewhere. The Americans claim the invention of driving boats by steam. But this is one of those improvements, or applications, of new motive power to old and widely-used instruments, so evidently feasible and desirable, that they are certain to be made in many places about the same time. Questions of priority of invention are of great importance to the individuals whose pecuniary interests or reputation is involved in them; but every real improvement grows so certainly from the condition of society, that the date of its appearance is of much more importance to history than the name of the uncertain and partial inventor. At any rate, our united Transtlantic brethren were the second great maritime power of the world. What they may dwindle to from their present quarrel we cannot know; but it may excite the astonishment of posterity with the present evidence before it of the prosperity they have already attained. We do not find any record of where the first American wind-mill was built, but the first water-mill was erected at Dorchester, probably as early as 1628; now the number of mills for grinding, sawing, paper-making, etc., etc., are beyond enumeration. The first paper-mill in the colonies was erected at Roxburgh, Pennsylvania, before 1693, by David Rittenhans, from Arnheim, on the Rhine; now above two thousand mills are employed in producing paper on a scale and quantity equal to that of any other country. The first printing-press was erected at Cambridge, where the establishment of a college was provided for, "within eighteen years after the Pilgrim Fathers had trod the rock of Plymouth." There education and printing went hand in hand. In some of the plantations, even in Massachusetts, there was much jealousy of the press, and licensers watched its operations, and determined what should be printed. Now they are unknown, and a printing-press, one of the necessities of modern civilization, is put up in every new settlement more certainly than a grist-mill. Such is a brief sketch of the rise and progress of manufactures in America. To say that, up to the period at which we write, perfection in any one of them, anywhere, has been attained would be simply to state an absurdity. But it is a melancholy reflection to think that the footprints of those pioneers who, within a cycle of less than three centuries, placed the broad arrow of civilization and progress on almost every rood of the American continent, should now be threatened with a partial, if not entire, extinction, through the influence of that fratricidal warfare, which, upas-like, casts its lethal shadow over the prospects of a country and a people as fertile and as noble as any in the world. It is-and sorry are we to be compelled to pen the words the retrogation of civilization to barbarismthe metamorphose of the peace-loving, earnest-working citizen and tiller of the soil to the whooping, sanguinary destroyer of his kind. What boots it to the world if the ideas of its greatest intellects, and the handicraft of its most cunning artificers, after centuries of probation, find the climacteric of their strength devoted to the destruction of the edifice they had reared with potent intellect and stalwart arm, and far and wide to hear the pleasant sounds of industry hushed in "The tumult of each sacked and burning village, The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder, The diapason of the cannonade.” These are the noble words of Longfellow, and we feel a glow of real pride when we think that their author-amongst the first of our living poets—is a native of the country whose scenic features he has limned so well, and to whose people his concluding words are just now so prophetic and suggestive. "Down the dark future, through long generations, I hear once more the voice of Christ say "Peace!" Peace! and no longer from its brazen portals The blast of war's great organ shakes the skies: But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of love arise." For the welfare of our brethren across the Atlantic, for our own, and for that of common humanity, we earnestly trust that ere long the valleys and plains which now echo the bays of sleuth-bounds and the fierce shouts of angry hosts, may hear once more "Nature's sweet and kindly voices." Ah! "Were half the power that fills the world with terror- Given to redeem the human mind from Error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts!" LILLIE BROWNE. BY RUTH MURRAY, AUTHOR OF THE "TWO LENORES," ETC. II. FIVE years have passed over George Tugram's head since he left his native town. Foreign travel has changed him somewhat in appearance, bronzed his skin, and given him a more stalwart, manly air. Something else, probably some inward process, has made his eyes graver, and his brow sadder. He stands on the deck of his ship, with folded arms, greeting eagerly as old friends, the well-remembered wharves and stores, as the vessel moves alongside the quay. Now he has sprung on shore, and, leaving his luggage, has walked briskly to a hotel in a familiar street. It is evening, and George Tugram sallies out to take a look at old streets and houses, and search out old faces. It is a dull expedition. It is wonderful what changes do happen in five years. He is standing before a certain house in a certain street. That is Lillie's room with the blind half drawn, where her canary used to hang. He wonders where it has gone. That is Dr. Browne's consulting room, and above it, is the drawing-room, which Lillie used to fill with music, in those evenings, those long dead and buried evenings. George walks up and down on the opposite shady side-path, wondering as he goes if he shall summon courage to cross, and knock at the door. We will not pry into the man's thoughts as he passes back and forwards upon the flags, till the light dies, and the dusk grows all down the street. At last he crosses the road, and knocks at the door. It is opened. "Pray, can I see Dr. Browne?" The maid looks puzzled. "He doesn't live here, sir, this house belongs to Mr. MPerhaps you mean the gentleman who lived here before we came. I believe he was a doctor, but he's dead, sir, he died at Mayfield, I think." "Dead! and his daughter, do you know anything of her?" "I do not, sir, I don't know anything, except that a doctor lived here, who died." George is punished now, amply punished for his faithlessness and his folly, as he turns down the street, shivering in the summer night. Dead! and where is Lillie gone? Lillie whom he had so loved, and forgotten for a few months of infatuation, whose image had risen again, and quickly stolen back into his heart, a heart purified by suffering and repentance, whose gentle spirit had borne him company all through his exile, whose light hand had drawn him homeward. And now having come at its urging, feeding on sweet hopes of undeserved happiness yet, to come, thirsting for dear words of forgiveness, he finds only the shadow of a grave. He knows her too well to fear that she is some happier man's contented |