Cruz and at New York, allowing for differences in the cost of carrying it; and the price measured in gold which it will return to the manufacturer from thence, or from Hamburg, or from Hong-Kong, must determine the price in gold at which it will sell to consumers in England-must determine, therefore, the profits in gold and wages in gold of the manufacturers and labourers who made the calico; and then, according to Adam Smith's law of equalization, the profits, wages, and other incomes of all other classes successively. Hence, the reason why English labour obtains generally higher money wages than continental labour is, that it is more efficient in producing exportable commodities, and therefore the makers of those commodities obtain, man for man, more gold than their continental rivals do, out of the general markets of the world. Thus the highly-efficient industry of Lancashire and the West Riding has, in half a century, doubled the wealth of the gentry of England. The proudest, yet, after all, the best aristocracy in the world, has been borne up to its lofty elevation by the toil of those little ones whose sorrows breathe forth in that heart-wringing poem of Mrs. Browning's, the "Song of the Children."

Mr. Senior's principle has, to my mind, the simplicity and, if I may so speak, the intuitive self-evidence of a great truth. Its working, however, in actual fact, cannot be other than most irregular—conflicting at every step with disturbing forces, and producing a violent friction and tendency to general dislocation in the social machinery-first in proportion to the vast magnitude and consequent immobility of that machinery; and secondly, to the greatness and violence of the new power brought to play upon it.

It will make the matter clearer, however, to trace first the general line of direction of the new revolution, and afterwards to notice those facts which will tend to obstruct the movement.

Prospect opened by the Theory.

Lancashire, then, must receive, or rather-as I believe, from the great increase in our exports-has already received, the first gush of the incoming stream. There must have been recently a very considerable increase, through profits, of the incomes of the manufacturers, and no doubt much increase also in the gains of the workmen. The expansibility of the industrial system of Lancashire is something of which the mind does not readily embrace the idea. It can scarcely be said to have been ever yet tried to the whole of its extent. The reports of the Factory Inspectors at different periods represent the investment of capital in the building of new mills, during different periods of increased foreign demand, as something more like the creation of an Aladdin's lamp than the works of unaided men. With a proportionate increase of foreign demand, there is almost no point to which the energy of Lancashire could not push the supply. Mills would multiply like mushrooms, and the machinery could be, and I fear would be, worked day and night. No markets could fully absorb production bursting up out of sources so abundant; but before noting any consequences of a check, it is well to trace the result of the first

movement.

The quickened industry of Lancashire, of course, would make a large addition to the aggregate of income received and spent by all the manufacturing classes, and some fractional proportion of that sum would be drawn into the gold currency, to distribute the goods consumed. Concurrently with the movement in Lancashire proceed, with a shade less of vehemence, similar movements in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in Lanarkshire, in the Birmingham and Wolverhampton district, in the Potteries, in the iron-works both of Scotland and Wales, and, in short, in all those hives of industry where the daily bread for wife and child is procured by working for unknown brethren at the ends of the earth. All these industries re

volving with unusual rapidity, fling off considerable additions to the aggregate of the national income, which draws out, as before, some additional circulation.

Successive Rise of Incomes.

The manufacturing incomes thus arising constitute an increase of demand, the play of which against existing stocks and services, heightens their value, and thus is generated an increase in a new and miscellaneous class of incomes, extending in a long and irregular line through a variety of trading and professional persons, from the little grocer whose tea is in double demand, to the fashionable music-master, who unfortunately can neither divide nor extend his supply, so as to give two guinea-lessons at the same time to two different manufacturers' daughters. The production of income out of income may be illustrated by a connection which competent judges have believed to exist between the outlay in railway salaries. and wages in 1845, and other phenomena near that period. The enormous personal expenditure of that year in London was followed by most unusual gains to the jewellers through the sale of trinkets and gold watches. It was the impulse, no doubt unknown to themselves, behind the backs of those who set up a second Italian Opera; and, in conjunction with other circumstances, it contributed not slightly to the undertaking of what is the most difficult of all commercial enterprises in England, namely, a new London morning newspaper. At every step new incomes, or additions to old ones, were the necessary consequences. In this manner, step by step, an upward impulse would be given to one series after another of the more variable incomes; but still with slight effect on the large mass of salaried employés, and with none at all on that wide-spread agricultural interest, which for a time might see the golden tide swelling and surging over the scorched and blasted plains of northern and central England, and through the populous towns towards the metropolis, without once turn

ing to visit the valleys of Devonshire, the pleasant downs of Kent and Sussex, or the well-stocked pastures of Lincoln.

First Rise of Agricultural Incomes.

"But land and trade are twins," as Sir Josiah Child says, and the sympathy would be felt. First, the market gardeners, dairymen, and graziers near great towns, would find greater returns. Next, and very quickly, the effect would reach all agriculturists connected with the rearing and fattening of stock; for, while foreign competition in this matter is of no account, the railways are tending to spread out and bring close down over the whole kingdom, the demand of Smithfield and the great towns, growing in intensity at least under the first growth of money incomes. The men of the Lothians, as distinctly in the front rank of agricultural industry as Lancashire is in manufactures, contrive to pay rents almost as high as if their lands yielded two crops in the year; and they do this by skill, vigilance, and untiring energy, which, amongst other things, makes Scotch meat come more easily and cheaply to the hand of a London butcher, than if it were fed on the meadows of the Lea or the hills of Berkshire. Receipts from corn growing, of course, with free trade, would do scarcely more than keep at the point determined by the natural protection of the home grower above the foreign level.

New Capital drawn to Manufactures.

But here we are brought again to Mr. Senior's theory, which, simple as it seems, involves a process of the utmost possible complexity, and in which only the first line of changes has been traced. We have supposed the general elevations of income to commence with the great manufacturing groups, the change being by them successively imparted to other classes, solely in consequence of their demand. But Mr. Senior's

theory now requires of us to look for the action of a new set of forces, lying deeper in the social organization.

The supposed high profits in Lancashire and similar places must needs attract a great deal of new capital. After our survey of the money market, there can be no doubt that new capital previously unemployed would be ready in great masses to meet the demand. But Mr. Senior's theory takes a far wider sweep than one which would merely clear out the supply from the London money market. It requires of us to contemplate a period when the manufacturing incomes, rising enormously, would not only draw to the north and central districts all unemployed capital, but would actually cause a transfer of capital actively employed, from those employments in which profits were least, to those in which they were greatest, until profits of all kinds reached the same level. Nor is this all; the range of the theory includes a still greater revolutiona change in the habits of man himself, or, in other words, a considerable transfer of labour from employments of the lowest wages to those most powerfully affected by the bullion influx. Then, and then only, the chain of causation would exhaust itself, and a new equilibrium be established; when the flood, heaving up class after class of the variable incomes, loosening as it were the moorings of the most stable industries, and floating them all up, raising the wages of the ploughman, and the salary of the bank-clerk, even the disgracefully poor stipends of the parish surgeon and the parish schoolmaster, should cease its fluctuations, as the last faint wave of change, after communicating, through some unwonted generosity of the House of Commons, its final impulse to the salaries of the servants of the State, died away at the embankment of the funded incomes.

It is true that very extraordinary changes in income did take place during the war, from a somewhat similar cause, namely, the enormous addition artificially made to the aggregate of income-and therefore of demand and prices-by the vast and

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