The rivers of New England cannot fall ten feet at any point in their progress to the sea without being made to propel some kind of machinery. Cities cluster round the falls of every large river, with great manufactories, as those of Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, Holyoake, &c. Many years ago I visited the village of Waterbury, in Connecticut, and spent a day among its curious factories. Water and Steam power were at work, but comparatively few human operatives. In one large room, full of machinery in rapid motion, there was but one man, whose business was to watch the machines and supply them with material. Each machine had a great coil of brass wire on a reel beside it. The end of the wire was placed in the machine, and from it flowed hooks or eyes into a basket as fast as one could count. These machines required only to be fed with coils of wire as they were used. In another room, automatic machines were eating up coils of iron-wire and discharging hair pins. Brass-wire went into other machines and came out common pins, with heads and points all perfect, and only requiring to be tinned and papered. The papering was done by a machine which picked out the pins, laid them in rows, and then pushed each row into a paper. One pin factory made three hundred thousand dozens of pins a-day. Another machine took wire from a coil and bits of brass from a hopper, and turned out buttons with the eyes made, set, and riveted.

Clocks are made in great factories, and so entirely by machinery, that almost the only hand-work is in putting them together; and they are made so cheap as to be brought to England in immense quantities, and thence exported to every part of the world. Watches are made in Massachusetts by similar machinery, and with such accuracy that every minutest part will fit every other, so that if a watch is injured, the required part can be supplied from the factory. Here, also, the only human labour is to feed and overlook the machines and put the parts together. The sewing machines of American invention are known every

where, and so are the reaping and mowing machines.

There is a manufactory in Pittsburgh in which a machine turns out half-pound iron railway spikes at the rate of fifty a minute. Only seven men are employed in the works, but the machines, with their attendance, make five tons of spikes a day. Nails of all sizes are made in self-feeding machines in enormous quantities. Strips of iron go in on one side and nails pour out on the other like meal from a mill. Rivets, neatly headed, from the smallest size up to seven to the pound, are made in the same manner; and the largest are turned out at the rate of eighty a minute from each machine. Beautiful oval frames for photographs are made and finished by machinery so rapidly that each workman can finish two gross a day. Automatic machines make each day ten thousand wooden shingles, for the roofs of houses. By the aid of machinery a man can make five pannelled house doors in a day. Shoe-lasts and boot-trees are made by rapid machinery. With similar aid seven men make the wooden parts of thirty ploughs a-day.

Labour-saving machinery is applied to stone and brickwork as well as iron and wood. Marble and granite are hammered, planed, and polished, by machinery. A stone surface of eight square feet is dressed in seven minutes. Bricks are pressed

from dry clay, ready for the kiln, at the

rate of thirty-six a

At the flour mills

minute, or nearly two thousand an hour. nearly the whole work is done by machinery, and the wheat is transferred from canal-boats to the upper stories of the mill at the rate of four thousand bushels an hour. Grain and other bags are woven whole in American looms, each loom making forty-five two-bushel bags a day. A similar machine makes hose for fire-engines at the rate of a thousand feet a day. By the use of type-casting machines a workman can cast ninety brevier types a minute. In the dyeing houses connected with large factories, one boy, with machinery, does the ordinary work of six men.

One of my earliest acquaintances in New York was Robert Hoe, the inventor of the simple and effective newspaper presses which bear his name, and which he has supplied to many of the largest printing establishments in England. Steam stevedores may be seen at the docks loading and unloading vessels, and steam hod-carriers in the large buildings. A steam excavator digs canals and railway-cuttings, and a steam-engine tunnels mountains. Morse, an American artist, but a better chemist and mechanician than painter, thought out the magnetic telegraph on a Havre packet-ship, but met the common fate of inventors. He struggled for years with poverty and a thousand difficulties. He could not interest capitalists. At last, when he was yielding to despair and meditated suicide, on the last night of a Session of Congress, at midnight, when the Appropriation Bill was being rushed through, he got an appropriation of six thousand pounds for an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore. Then success, rewards, honours, titles of nobility, gold medals, and an immense fortune. The American inventor of the sewing machine had similar misfortunes and then as great a success. Would any one but an American have ever invented a milking machine? or a machine to beat eggs? or machines to black boots, scour knives, pare apples, and do a hundred things that all other peoples have done with their ten fingers from time immemorial?

He

Skill and intelligence are required for the management of machinery. Every child under fifteen employed in the factories of Massachusetts is secured three months' schooling every year by law. The American workman has no jealousy of machinery. It carries out his idea of the emancipation of labour. welcomes every improvement that facilitates his work. millennium is the time when machines will do everything, and he will have only to see them work and enjoy the fruits of their labour. His most difficult problem will be the equitable division of the productions of machinery among those who pro

His

fess the political doctrine that "all men are created equal,” and have an inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

When an average Englishman is thrown out of the employment to which he has been trained it is with great difficulty that he turns to any other. He will wait idly for months or years to find work in the one thing he has learned to do. Not so an American. He is full of resources, and can turn his hand to anything. Generations of training in all the requirements of a new country have given him hereditary precocity and versatility. There is nothing he will not undertake, and few things he cannot accomplish. For example, I know an American, a fair enough average of his countrymen, who in his boyhood learned all the work of a farm, and could plough, hoe, reap, mow, chop wood, and so on. He also learned to make bricks and lay them, get out and carve stone, work in brass and steel, make clocks, set types and print books and newspapers. He studied music, and plays several instruments; knows something of languages and art; has written plays, and acted them; is an ingenious inventor; has been an active politician, made speeches, given public lectures, edited newspapers, studied and practiced a learned profession; been a foreign correspondent; written many volumes of science and general literature.

We hear of self-made men in England. In America there are scarcely any others. The romantic story of Whittington is there an every-day affair. A Governor of New Hampshire, visiting Lowell not long ago, with some members of his Council, stayed at a hotel in which he had once served as bootblack. A rail-splitter and flat boatman, and an illiterate journeyman tailor, become successively Presidents of the Great Republic that expects, during the next century, to control the destinies of universal humanity.

CHAPTER VII.

PECULIARITIES AND ECCENTRICITIES.

ENGLISHMEN know the Yankee chiefly as he appears in literature and on the stage. He is well drawn in the novels of John Neal, Cooper, Paulding, and Mrs. Stowe, and in the writings of the author of Sam Slick and James Russell Lowell. Hackett, Hill, Jefferson, and other American actors and artists, have given us pretty good Yankees on the stage. We imagine that literary and dramatic portraitures are overdone. I do not think I have never seen a stage Irishman, Cockney, Yankee, or negro that came fully up to the genuine article. The trouble is not in overdoing, but in doing falsely. Many English writers confuse the American idioms and peculiarities of the East, West, and South. It is as if one should mix up Scotchmen, Irishmen, and Cockneys.

SO.

It is possible to travel through America without meeting many specimens of the thorough Yankee, the broad Western man, or the distinctive Southerner of the strongest type; but they all exist abundantly. There are districts in New England, in the rough mountain regions, where the Yankee flourishes as grotesque in the attire and speech as was ever described in story or seen upon the stage. Western and Southern peculiarities are still more common.

I know of no physiological reason why a Yankee should talk through his nose, unless he got the habit of shutting his mouth to keep out the cold fogs and drizzling north-easters of Massachusetts Bay. It is certain that men open their mouths and broaden their speech as they go West, until on the Mississippi they tell you "thar are heaps of bar (bears) over thar, whar I was raised." Southern speech is clipped, softened, and broadened by the negro admixture. The child learns its language