LYONS, with its narrow dark streets and lofty old houses on each side, resembles some of the old parts of the old town of Edinburgh. It is built at the confluence of the Rhone and Saone, upon a flat tongue of land, so narrow that the stranger is surprised, on taking the breadth of the city, to come so soon from the one river quay to the other; and on taking its length in his walk, he can scarcely believe that this is the second city in France, a city nearly as populous as Edinburgh. In 1831, it contained 165,459 inhabitants; and Edinburgh in 1831 reckoned 178,371. But on looking more carefully, the traveller perceives that the secondary streets are remarkably narrow, the houses very lofty and densely inhabited, each a little town of people within itself, and, as in Edinburgh, a great proportion of the inhabitants lodge in the air, not on the surface of the earth.

In this chief seat of the silk manufacture in France, and, at no distant period, in Europe, the manufacturing arrangements are apparently ill adapted to the improvement, extension, or even the future existence of its trade, against the competition of England, Prussia, and Switzerland. The old leaven of the corporation system sticks to Lyons; and the distress in which her operatives are so frequently plunged that their whole existence, it may be said, is distress, is very much the consequence of a faulty arrangement of business not suitable to the times. The master-manufacturer has no factory and workmen constantly in his employ. He merely buys the raw material, and gives it out to be

sorted, spun, dyed, and put in a state for the silk weaver. In these operations, which are not conducted in his own premises or factory, he has but very imperfect checks upon embezzlement, and none upon waste. The division of labour in a manufacture is not

always economical. It is a very nice point, in practice, to judge of its applicability, and to adjust it to advantage. Cheap production may arise from a division of labour under one head or master-manufacturer; but faulty processes, loss of time, and a waste of labour and means, may arise from a division among different subcapitals, and independent operators, of such labour or operations as are essential for producing a good and cheap product. It requires great judgment to determine

happily self-interest is the surest guide what may be left to others to prepare, and what the manufacturer must, from first to last, carry on himself. In Lyons, in the silk trade, the laying or preparing the pattern for the loom is the work of independent workmen ; although the patterns are produced by a draughtsman, who is generally a partner with the master-manufacturer. The weavers again are independent workmen also, living and working each in his own shop, with two or three looms for different kinds of fabric, and with journeymen to work them. He lodges and boards the journeymen, finds the looms and the work, and gets one half or one third of their earnings, according to the regulations or customs of the craft, as established for the different stuffs or fabrics. This master-weaver is paid for the work by the master-manufacturer so much per ell. This is the state of infancy in manufacturing operations with us—a a happy infancy, but still a state of infancy in which capital has not been accumulated, or machinery invented, to enable the master-manufacturer to concentrate his operations.

It is evident that the eye and superintendence of the master-manufacturer cannot be given to quality and economy, where every operation essential to the manufacture is not under one roof, or one guidance, with

partners and managers attending it, and with workmen responsible directly to one head, and whose hands are always kept employed in the same kinds of work. When the web is done it is too late to check faulty workmanship, or save the character of the goods, by putting better workmen or better material to it. As long as the Continent had only Lyons, and England only her French colony in Spitalfields, to look to for the greater part of their silk fabrics, the system went on; but when Manchester, Paisley, and, on the Continent, Zurich, and other places, took up the silk trade upon different manufacturing principles, the superior economy and quality of their fabrics ruined these old seats of the silk manufacture. England, about twelve years ago, was reckoned to have about 10,000 looms engaged in the silk manufacture, and is now reckoned to have about 80,000. Lyons and its neighbourhood has now but 31,000; and Zurich and its neighbourhood is reckoned to have above 20,000. In all that regards the preparation of the silk, and the texture and quality of the stuffs, the English excel the French manufacturers, and in economy so decidedly, that the ell of silk stuff which cannot be produced at Lyons under the cost for labour of 120 to 125 centimes, costs in labour only 40 centimes in England. A certain number of privileged workmen are alone entitled to set up as masters in the weaving and other branches of the silk manufacture at Lyons, and are entitled to exclude others from the exercise of their trade. They must have served as apprentices and as journeymen for certain periods, and cannot set up for themselves without large fees of entry for the freedom of the craft, be the demand for looms ever so great. The French Revolution gave political liberty only to the people the forms of constitutional government-but gave them no civil liberty, nor to this day is civil liberty, or the perfect freedom of every citizen to act for himself without interference, understood or thought of by the French people, any more than before the Revolution. The municipal taxes

pre

on the transit of goods through towns, the leave and licence necessary to carry industry from one locality to another, and the restraints upon its free exercise, as here in silk weaving, are in full vigour. The only argument in favour of this system of corporate privileges is, that it allows the small capitalist as well as the large to live, and this is not an argument to be despised in social economy. The weaver with his two or three looms has an independent existence; and, however inefficient as a producer of silk fabrics at the cheapest rate compared to the master-manufacturer who has a couple of hundred looms perhaps at work under his eye, with all that cedes and follows the weaving going on simultaneously, he is one of a body far more valuable in social relation than the two or three great capitalists who supersede this body of middle class manufacturers. But this is, unhappily, the natural and unavoidable progress of manufacturing industry. Large capital, when it comes into competition with small capital in the world's wide market, inevitably drives the small out of the field. An aristocracy of large capitalists obtains the possession, the property it may be called, of supplying all human wants, and holds it by the best of all tenures that of being able to supply mankind cheapest. It is a manufacturing and physical good, but asocial and moral evil. The actual operative in Great Britain has no prospect before him. He may save a few hundred pounds by unceasing industry and sobriety; but why should he save it? This little saved capital — call it thousands instead of hundreds of pounds sterling - can do nothing in the present state of our trade and manufactures, in competition with the vast capitals accumulated by long inheritance, pre-occupying every branch of industry and manufacture, and producing far cheaper than he can do with his trifling means. Land by the effect of the corn laws, and of the privilege accorded to that kind of property, is out of his reach as much as trade and manufacture; there being no small estates in Britain, generally speak

chase and sit down upon with his family to live as a working yeoman, or peasant proprietor; small capitals when they are accumulated are forced into trade and manufacture, although every branch is oversupplied with the means of producing. What can a man turn to who has a little capital of three or four thousand pounds? What can he enter into with any reasonable prospect of not losing his little capital in his most honest and prudent efforts? And what can the working man do, but spend his earnings, drink, and fall into a reckless improvident way of living, when he sees clearly that every avenue to an independent condition is, by the power of great capital, shut against him? A vassalage in manufacture and trade is succeeding the vassalage in land, and the serf of the loom is in a lower and more helpless condition than the serf of the glebe; because his condition appears to be not merely the effect of an artificial and faulty social economy, like the feudal, which may be remedied, but to be the unavoidable effect of natural causes. Mankind will naturally prefer the best and cheapest goods. Great capitals will naturally produce better and cheaper than small capitals applied to the same objects. Corporations, trade restrictions, privileges either of masters or workmen, and all such local or partial legislation, add to instead of curing the evil, for they can only reach the producers, not the consumers; and few, indeed, are the branches of industry, in which the producers have a command of the market. The feudalisation going on in our manufacturing social economy is very conspicuous in some of the great cotton factories. The master-manufacturer in some districts, who employs eight hundred or a thousand hands, deals in reality only with fifty or sixty sub-vassals or operative cotton spinners, as they are technically called, who undertake the working of so many looms, or spinning jennies. They hire and pay the men, women, and children, who are the real operatives, grinding their wages down to the lowest rate, and getting the highest they can out of the master-manufacturer. A strike is often the ope