What is the reason that this trade is not infinitely larger? I fear we must look to the United States for a reply. They have not yet followed our example, in adopting that system of unrestricted interchange which we designate FREE Trade.

SECTION III.-MANUFACTURES.

CHAPTER I.

AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.

THE AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENT manufacture is in many respects the most important branch of the manufacturing industry of America. It is not, indeed, the largest branch, for the value of the Agricultural Implements produced in 1860 was only $17,800,000, whilst the values of cotton goods, boots and shoes, &c., were taken at much larger amounts. But the superior importance of this branch of business is attested by the fact that the manufacture of Agricultural Implements was the manufacture which exhibited the greatest increase between 1850 and 1860, the quantities produced being―

or an increase of no less than 160 per cent. !

It could scarcely, in fact, be otherwise. America is an agricultural country. It is an agricultural country suffering under a grievous deficiency in the supply of agricultural labour. The high rate of wages, and indeed I may say the absolute absence, in many cases, of workpeople to take wages, has stimulated invention. Mechanical contrivances of every sort are produced to supply the want of human hands. Thus we find America producing a machine even to peel apples; another to beat eggs; a third to clean knives; a fourth to wring clothes ;-in fact, human hands have scarcely been engaged in any employment in which some cheap and efficient labour-saving machine does not now, to some extent, replace them. Many of these machines have been brought to Europe, and some of them are appreciated and largely used in our own country. But we do not appreciate them as the Americans appreciate them, because they are not of the same value to us. They do not save us, that is to say, the same amount of expenditure in wages, for the simple reason that our wages are not so high.

As America is pre-eminently agricultural, it follows that the most numerous attempts to produce laboursaving implements have been directed to facilitate the labours of the farm. Every succeeding year produces new inventions for saving muscular labour in the farm and household. Up to 1848 the number of patented inventions in the United States belonging to the class of agriculture was 2,043; but since that year they must have been more than doubled, for there were no less

than 350 applications for new patents for Agricultural Implements in 1861, a number which had increased to 502 in 1863. The withdrawal of nearly a million of agriculturists from their ordinary pursuits to engage in military service seems to have greatly stimulated this class of invention—as was, indeed, not unnatural.

*

It must be admitted that throughout the world the implements of husbandry have remained in a very rude, and in many cases a very primitive, condition. The hoe, the spade, and even the ploughshare, are really almost barbarous contrivances. As far back as 1660, our Royal Society felt the importance of improved agriculture, and endeavoured to awaken the public mind to the value of mechanical aids in farming. Agricultural Societies in America appear to have been established, in 1785, in South Carolina and Pennsylvania, with the object of "affording encouragement to the making of engines for

* There was a little book, published some years ago, by a gentleman who has since obtained some celebrity as an agriculturist, Mr. Chandos Wren Hoskyns, which brought this fact, as I remember, very forcibly home to my conviction. It was called "TALPA, or the Chronicles of a Clay Farm," and one of the writer's principal objects was to show the difficulty of working on certain soils with a plough, and to recommend the substitution of some machine for creating the seed-bed such as the mole (Talpa) was provided with. This little volume, so eminently instructive, and, at the same time, so agreeably amusing, I recommend to the perusal of all my American friends, and especially to those interested in the production of agricultural implements. I should not despair of seeing a steam soil cultivator and pulverizer of an efficient character produced upon the principles recommended by Mr. Hoskyns in his "Talpa," if some ingenious mind would turn attention to the best mode of superseding the plough.

the propagation of the staples of the colony." The Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture made efforts in the same direction in 1792; but the principal result of all these exertions was improvement in the form and finish of ordinary farm-tools.

In 1833, as we are told, the harvesting of corn by machinery was effected near Cincinnati by a gentleman named Obed Hussey, "who cradled wheat as fast as eight persons could bind it." About the same time State and County Agricultural Societies began to spring up in the United States, and a system of annual fairs and exhibitions instituted by those Societies powerfully stimulated invention, and made the farmers familiar with the best forms of Agricultural Implements in use.

Still, however, inventors in America were without the opportunity of comparing their machines with others in use in the Old World, and mechanics in Europe were comparatively unacquainted with the American implements. It was not until our Great Exhibition of 1851 that an opportunity was offered of comparing ideas on the subject of mechanics as applied to agriculture. "That exhibition," the Americans officially report, exercised a vast influence on this subject, as it did upon all the branches of art.

"Although the number of implements of each kind exhibited by the United States was small, the variety was considerable. The general excellence of American ploughs, reapers, churns, scythes, axes, forks, and other implements was acknowledged by the public admission of disinterested judges, and the particular merits of many by the medals awarded, and by the number of orders received at the time by the manufacturers. The triumph of the American