by which our manufactures have been created and carried to their present excellence, is scarcely to be imagined.  If we look around the rooms we inhabit, or through those storehouses of every convenience, of every luxury that man can desire, which deck the crowded streets of our larger cities, we shall find in the history of each article, of every fabric, a series of failures which have gradually led the way to excellence; and we shall notice, in the art of making even the most insignificant of them, processes calculated to excite our admiration by their simplicity, or to rivet our attention by their unlooked-for results.

2.  The accumulation of skill and science which has been directed to diminish the difficulty of producing manufactured goods, has not been beneficial to that country alone in which it is concentrated; distant kingdoms have participated in its advantages.  The luxurious natives of the East,(1*) and the ruder inhabitants of the African desert are alike indebted to our looms.  The produce of our factories has preceded even our most enterprising travellers.(2*) The cotton of India is conveyed by British ships round half our planet, to be woven by British skill in the factories of Lancashire:  it is again set in motion by British capital; and, transported to the very plains whereon it grew, is repurchased by the lords of the soil which gave it birth, at a cheaper price than that at which their coarser machinery enables them to manufacture it themselves.(3*)

3.  The large proportion of the population of this country, who are engaged in manufactures, appears from the following table deduced from a statement in an Essay on the Distribution of Wealth, by the Rev. R. Jones: 

For every hundred persons employed in agriculture, there are: 

Agriculturists Non-agriculturists

In Bengal          100             25
In Italy           100             31
In France          100             50
In England         100             200

The fact that the proportion of non-agricultural to agricultural persons is continually increasing, appears both from the Report of the Committee of the House of Commons upon Manufacturers’ Employment, July, 1830, and from the still later evidence of the last census; from which document the annexed table of the increase of population in our great manufacturing towns, has been deduced.

Increase of population per cent

Names of places
                     1801-11 1811-21 1821-31 Total
Manchester 22 40 47 151
Glasgow 30 46 38 161
Liverpool(4*) 26 31 44 138
Nottingham 19 18 25 75
Birmingham 16 24 33 90
Great Britain 14.2 15.7 15.5 52.5

Thus, in three periods of ten years, during each of which the general population of the country has increased about 15 per cent, or about 52 per cent upon the whole period of thirty years, the population of these towns has, on the average, increased 132 per cent.  After this statement, there requires no further argument to demonstrate the vast importance to the well-being of this country, of making the interests of its manufacturers well understood and attended to.