CHAPTER X.

PRODUCTIVE INTERESTS.

Agriculture Manufactures-Commerce.-Progress, Subdi visions, and utility of each.-Their community of interest, and equal importance.-Preference awarded to Agricul ture owing to the unnatural existing relations of population and subsistence.

THE various branches of industry into which the business of production divides itself in a civilized and highly advanced community, are nearly infinite in number. They are ordinarily classed, however, for more easy consideration, into three great departments, or, as they are called, interests' -viz. the agricultural, the manufacturing, and the commercial or trading interest.

1. The Agricultural interest includes all whose land, capital, or labour is employed in the growth of food and the raw materials of manufacture. It comprehends, in this country, the more or less distinct classes of landowners, farmers, and la bourers. Among the two latter there are various subdivisions. The corn-grower, the dairy-farmer, the cattle-breeder, and the cultivator of hops, madder, flax, teazles, &c. are, in general, different persons: as the carter, ploughman, herdsman, shepherd, drover, hedger and ditcher, woodsman, &c.

are distinct occupations among agricultural labour ers. Those who follow the business of meal men, corn and cattle-dealers, and some others, are so closely connected with this interest as to rank rather in it than in either of the other divisions.

The history of agriculture is a subject of great interest, for which, however, we must refer our readers to the works especially devoted to this subject. Of all arts it is perhaps that in which the least improvement has been made in the course of the historical ages, notwithstanding its pre-eminent utility. Still its progress has been considerable, especially in this country, where, since the adoption of turnip-husbandry, the substitution of green crops for fallows, and the great extension of sheep-farming, the produce of our superior soils has been more than doubled, and large crops raised off millions of acres of poor land which previously would bear nothing to repay their cultivation.

A wide field is here still open for improvements to which no probable limit can be assigned. The science of agricultural chemistry is yet in its infancy. Its further progress will, no doubt, enable us greatly to multiply the produce of a limited tract, and, perhaps, to bring the most barren surfaces into profitable cultivation. Even now, a deficiency of manure is the only check to the productiveness of any soils, and as yet one of the most copious sources of supply of the most valuable of all manures, the sewerage of great towns -is wholly neglected. By taking the necessary steps for securing and applying this, a great start

might probably be given to the agriculture of densely peopled countries.*

2. It is the business of Manufacturers to work up for use the raw materials raised at home by the preceding class, or imported from abroad; giving them the shape of clothing, houses, household furniture, machinery, tools, and a variety of conveniences and ornaments. They comprehend numerous branches; such as the iron, the woollen, the cotton, the silk, the leather, the stocking, the glove, the hat, the carpet, the lace, and the soap trades, the house and ship-builders, cabinetmakers, gold and silversmiths, watch-makers, brass ornament makers, cutlers, printers and publishers, engineers, &c.; and each of these separate trades is subdivided into numberless distinct avocations. There are many to whom the term manufacturers is not ordinarily applied, who would yet be reckoned as such in any general classification of the entire body of producers: such are tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, joiners, smiths, plasterers, bakers, maltsters, curriers, &c., with the entire class of artisans employed in these several trades.*

The economical history of manufactures is a

* See Mr. J. Martin's Plan for purifying the air and water of the metropolis. 1833.

The term manufacture is usually applied only to esta blishments on a large scale; and those who produce the same article on a small scale are called makers rather than manufacturers: but in a scientific treatise, and when employed to designate a class of operations in contradistinction to agriculture, the term must be extended, so as to embrace all those occupations by which the raw productions of the earth are worked up into objects of use or ornament, whether by the labour of one individual or of many.

subject of very considerable interest to the student of political economy, but would, if fully gone into, occupy a much larger space than can be afforded to it in this little volume. It well deserves, indeed, to form the exclusive matter of a separate work; and I am not without hopes that it may, before long, be taken up and illustrated by the same author who, in the volume he has published on Rent, has so ably examined and described the circumstances which, in different times and countries, have determined the mode of occupation and cultivation of the soil.*

The division of labour which takes place in a very rude state of society must, even in the infancy of every nation, have effected a certain separation between the classes who occupy themselves in tilling the soil and gathering its crops, and those who are engaged in working up these crops or the other raw products of the earth, and fitting them for general use, in the form of tools, raiment, ornaments, houses, furniture, &c.

A further subdivision of this class of industrious occupations among different trades or crafts, each giving employment to distinct ranks of artificers, seems likewise to have taken place at a very early period in the history of art. The goldsmiths, the jewellers, the workers in iron, in brass, in wood, in stone, in pottery, in woollen, and in linen; the shoemakers, the tailors, the carpenters, the plasterers, and the masons, are spoken of in the Jewish Scriptures and other early records, and appear to have followed

*Jones on the Distribution of Wealth and the Sources of Taxation.

ITS RECENT ADVANCES.

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exclusively their several avocations from the first dawn of civilization. A common professional education, a common interest in the advancement of their art, and a desire, by combination and monopoly, to exclude competition and obtain a higher return for their labour, seem, in most countries, to have occasioned the union of the artisans following any one of these several trades into a sort of corporate fraternity, sometimes sanctioned by charters, like the guilds of the European states subsequent to the middle ages. Some of these fraternities unquestionably attained a very high excellence in their particular departments of industry. The association of freemasons, to whose migratory labours it is generally supposed that we are indebted for nearly all the rich and beautiful ecclesiastical and domestic edifices which were reared through Europe during the eleventh and five succeeding centuries, evinced a purity of taste and fertility of conception in architectural design, as well as a power of execution, which the. builders of modern times have vainly attempted to rival. Nothing can exceed the workmanship of the armourers, or of the goldsmiths and jewellers, of the fifteenth century; and carving in both wood and stone was carried, about the same time, nearly to equal perfection. The gorgeous silks and velvets of the same period probably could not be imitated by any artisans in the present day; and tapestries and other productions of the loom were then wrought with an excellence which has never been surpassed. The art of staining glass may be mentioned as another in which modern artists