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specimen seems not a very happy one. 1 and 2. Of the treading in a wheel,
or drawing in a capstern, for turning a mill, nothing can be said
in respect of pecuniary productiveness, till the mill the machine
or the engine are specified; no any thing that can be found to
distinguish them from other employments, exept except the room, and the
expence, which such implements seem more particularly to require.
Beating of hemp is a business too proverbial to be unknown to
any body; and in those establishments, where it has compulsion
for its motive, has not hitherto, I believe, proved a very profitable
one:+ Rasping logwood is an employment, which is said by Mr Howard,
+and if I may believe
people who are in the
trade and who have
no interest in misleading
me, hemp beaten
by hand, though it
takes more labour, does
not fetch so good a
price, as when beaten
at a watermill. 4.
I think, and others to be carried on in some Work-houses in
Holland, and I believe to some profit. But I know it has been carried
on likewise by the natural primum mobiles: witness a Windmill,
which I remember a tennant of yours employed in this way: and
I can conceive few operations in which those natural powers promise
to have greater advantage over the human. 5. Chopping rags
is a business, which that answers no other purpose than the supplying
materials for paper-mills, which cannot any where be established
without a supply of running water: an element which I am sure certainly
in most, many, and, I am apt to think, in all paper-mills, hitherto established,
affords for this operation a primum mobile much more
advantageous than human labour. In the 6th 7th and 8th examples, viz:
sawing timber, working at forges, and smelting, I see nothing to
distinguish them very remarkably from three hundred others
that might be mentioned, unless it be the great room they all of them
occupy, the great and expensive establishment which they suppose, or
the dangerous weapons which they put into the hands of any workman
who may be disposed to turn that property to account. 9th. Ropemaking,
which stands at the head of the less laborious class,
besides being, as I have always understood, remarkably otherwise,
has the particular property of taking up more room than I believe
any other manufacturing employment that was ever thought of. To
the three last articles of the dozen, viz: weaving socks, spinning yarn,
and knitting nets, I know of no particular objections that can be made,
any more than to threescore others. But, without going a stone's throw
from the table I am writing upon, I could find out more than as
many businesses, which pay better, in England, than these three last
in other respects unexceptional ones, which are as easy to learn,
take up as little room, and require a capital nearly or quite
as moderate to set up. By coming here, if I have learnt nothing
else, I have learnt what the human powers are capable of when
unfettered by the arbitrary regulations of an unenlightened age: and
Gentlemen may say what they please, but they shall never persuade
me that in England those powers are in any remarkable degree inferior
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