as 30,000 French shoemakers. Some of our American factories will take the raw leather and cut and make in twenty minutes a pair of ladies' shoes ready for wear." It is true that farmers also have a great addition to their working forces in the machinery which is worked by horses, mules, and oxen, and lately by a modicum of steam-power also; but steam-power, as a productive force in manufacturing, is far greater than all these. As a force to add to our national wealth and to promote the prosperity of the people, manufacturing, if possible, outranks all other industries.

Steam-power and machinery add more than one billion of dollars to our productive force in manufacturing every year, independent of human exertion. Foreign countries gain this wealth when they do our manufacturing for us.

The returns of the tenth census (1880) give the following statistics of manufactories in the United States:

Number of establishments, 253,840; capital invested, $2,790,223,506; total amount paid in wages, $947,919,674; value of materials, $3,394,340,029; value of products, $5,369,667,706.

Spofford gives the aggregate returns for other years as follows: 1870, $4,232,325,442; 1860, $1,885,861,676; 1850, $1,019,106,616. This shows an increase in value of manufactured products between 1850 and 1880 of $4,350,472,575, a sum too large for the mind to grasp. But since then it has taken another leap, and the figures of the next census, if the present rate of progress continues, will be just as bewildering. During the same period British manufactures increased only 100 per cent, while our increase was, everything considered, nearly 600 per cent.

In the flouring and grist mills alone the product in 1880 was five hundred and five millions of dollars. The figures for this industry last year showed an increase almost past belief. There were even in 1880 25,000 mills, with a capacity to grind five million bushels daily, enough to feed our own people and 300,000,000 Europeans, who consume annually one billion three hundred and forty-seven million bushels.

In the slaughtering and beef-packing industry in 1880 $50,000,000 capital was invested, 30,000 persons employed, and

a product turned out valued at three hundred and three million dollars. Nearly two million cattle were killed, two million three hundred thousand sheep, sixteen million hogs, as we have stated under another head.

The production of steel rails has grown so enormously that we now manufacture more than any other country in the world. The importation of steel rails has also declined from 182,135 net tons in 1882 to 2395 tons in 1885. Importations under the rise in prices are now increasing again. It is estimated that more than $1,800,000,000 worth of steel rails have been made in this country, and the money which this vast production has cost has been kept at home to build up our own towns and cities.

In the year 1850 we manufactured 564,755 tons of pig-iron, while in 1883 we made 5,146,972 tons net, and in the latter year we also imported 490,875 tons. Since the reduction of duties in 1883 the production of pig-iron has fallen off, in 1885, 1,135,595 tons. In 1886 we surpassed Great Britain both in production of steel and consumption of iron. It is not possible to calculate the general good derived from the building up of this mammoth industry by a protective policy. It brought into and retained in the country vast sums of money, to go into and quicken all the avenues and arteries of trade, to build up cities, and by so doing creating home markets for the agriculturist, and adding greatly to the volume of trade and the business of transportation.

Our lumber trade in 1880 employed 150,000 men who were paid $32,000,000, and turned into market a product valued at two hundred and thirty-four million dollars. In one year 8,000,000,000 feet of lumber has been cut in three States alone; 1,500,000,000 feet of pine was cut in the South, and 216,000,000,000 left standing. The supply of timber cannot soon be exhausted, and the amount untouched cannot be estimated in figures. Recently Senator Palmer of Michigan was asked whether the lumber of Michigan, between lumbermen and fires, was not about exhausted. He replied that there was yet standing in the single State of Michigan enough timber to make a board fence fifteen boards high around the earth three times every year for fifteen years.

But we have not the space to name in detail the thousands of branches of manufacturing in the country. That industry and the inventions to simplify it are the marvels of the world. The communities that have grown up about the great manufactories with their pretty cottages, paved streets, gas, electricity, telephones, telegraphs, railroads, street-cars, parks, churches, schools, libraries, lyceums, and all the other concomitants of our advanced civilization, make the ideal industrial community that students of political economy and statesmen and scholars have dreamed of and theorized about in the past, and finally relegated to the limbo of Utopia as impossible of realization.

But here we have it, and nearly every one of these neat homes of the operatives is owned by the man who resides in it, just as nearly all the farms of America are owned by the men. who till them. As an evidence of the prosperity of our operatives and wage-workers who own their own homes, send their children to the free schools, the high schools and even colleges, the savings-bank deposit is a faithful index. Last year the total deposit was $1,235,247,371, and the number of depositors was 3,418,013. The mill operatives of Massachusetts alone have in deposit $274,098,413; those of New York, $506,000,000, which is $100,000,000 more than the entire accumulation in the savings banks of England in four centuries. The laboring men of little Rhode Island alone have to their credit in the savings banks fifty-two millions of dollars. Our deposits have been more than three times as much under protection as under free trade.

The English savings banks in thirty-four years of free trade increased their deposits $350,000,000. During nineteen years of protection in the United States, deposits in the banks of nine States increased $628,000,000. Our operatives deposit seven dollars to the English operatives' one.

In this condition of welfare and money-saving, largely the fruit of Republican policy, the laboring man has leisure and ease of mind, and can give his attention to devices for improving machinery and methods. Nearly all the ingenious mechanism of our workshops is invented by practical workers themselves.

The foreign laborer, pinched by poverty, brutalized, ignorant and neglected, has no chance to think about the machinery or anything else, except his few coarse and oftentimes degraded pleasures.

Thus we are given one of our greatest advantages in the ingenuity and intelligence of our operatives, who possess inventiveness as a national trait. Herbert Spencer testified that "beyond question, in respect of mechanical appliances, the Americans are ahead of all nations." The fact of superior tools would alone give us no small advantage, but the possession of the best machinery implies much more—namely, that we have also the best mechanics in the world.

While the manufactures of France from 1870 to 1880 increased $230,000,000, those of Germany $430,000,000, and those of Great Britain $580,000,000, those of the United States increased $1,030,000,000-an increase almost equal to that of these three great nations combined. While England's coal is growing dearer, ours will be growing cheaper. The development of our vast resources will greatly increase, and hence cheapen raw materials. Every year the superior intelligence and inventive genius of our workmen elevate the standard of excellence in our machinery and mechanical appliances, and will continue to do so.

Even now, in almost every manufactured commodity, we can and do undersell foreign countries in their own marts, cheapen the steel in Sheffield, the watches in Switzerland, the cotton in Manchester, and the electric plate in Birmingham. And while we undersell them on their own door-sills, it is no wonder they put forth every effort to procure free trade with America, and break down the protective barrier thrown around our industries, or that their sympathy is with the Democratic party and against the party which considers it a patriotic duty to uphold the "American System."

COMMERCE.

In estimating the growth and development of our commerce during the last thirty years we must not consider mo '}

the greater bulk, but the change in character and increase in variety, of the subject-matter of commerce.

Our

Science has disclosed more important uses for thousands of articles which have been held as worthless, and the inventive genius of the country has produced numberless novel and useful improvements in the devices and instrumentalities for lightening the labor of and lifting the burdens from our people, while multiplying their comforts a thousandfold. Of course industries have been and are the parents of our commerce, furnishing as they do the materials for that commerce. Thirtyfive years ago the commerce of our country was confined, in the main, to a comparatively limited number of articles. Our industries were then to what they are now as one to ten. They presented a scene of drudgery and struggling poverty.

Under a wise policy of favorable and encouraging legislation they have grown to the vast proportions that have been indicated under previous heads in this article.

With this advance, commerce and trade have kept pace with adequate improvements in shipping, handling, and transportation, and with them have come improved facilities for exchange, a perfection of national currency, increase of wages, increase of wealth, the upspringing of great States, communities, and cities, unparalleled increase of population, procurement of comforts and luxuries, and upraising of the general standard of living, of education and intelligence-thus raising and advancing the condition of a people beyond anything ever known in a like time in the world's history. Our tremendous rate of progress may be judged by the fact that last year after supplying our sixty million people with everything needful, far beyond what the general people of any other country can afford, we sold to the world merchandise to the value of over seven hundred and sixteen million dollars, as against two hundred and eighty-one millions in 1856, and that in 1850 our total domestic export was $136,946,912, against $703,022,923 last year (1887).

We were able to sell to the world in 1850 one hundred and twenty-four million dollars' worth of agricultural products, and last year we made the rest of the world pay us for our surplus agricultural product five hundred and twenty-three million