ABSTRACT
The manufacturing system has already so far extended its influence over the British Empire, as to effect an essential change in the general character of the mass of the people. Those who were engaged in the trade, manufactures, and commerce of this country thirty or forty years ago, formed but a very insignificant portion of the knowledge, wealth, influence, or population of the Empire. The immediate effects of this manufacturing phenomenon were a rapid increase of the wealth, industry, population, and political influence of the British Empire; and by the aid of which it has been enabled to contend for five-and-twenty years against the most formidable military and immoral power that the world perhaps ever contained. Contrast this state of matters with that of the lower orders of the present day; – with human nature trained as it now is, under the new manufacturing system.
