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can only fall in with the current, and prepare themselves to meet, as best they may, the responsibilities and perils which it shall evolve.

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Another fact is no less clear. The influence of manufactures on education and morals, is to be, one way or another, tremendous. They have already levied their contributions on nearly every town and village. They embosom the flower of many families of the yeomanry of the land-families from which have sprung the greater part of our most honored and useful men, and of which it is not exaggeration or flattery, but simple truth to assert, that they compose the bone and sinew of the nation's strength. Not a few of the youth who fill these abodes of honorable industry, are the offspring of piety and prayer. And around these crowded resorts, are clustered the supplications and hopes of many of the best hearts in our churches. They here form a society in which the elements of good and evil are brought into direct and fearful collision. Parental oversight is withdrawn. The kindly influence of the family, restraining from vice and stimulating to good behavior with all the secret magic of a charm, is here almost unknown. They are linked by active and numerous sympathies with every possible variety of character, and are exposed to every species of temptation. It is true their pursuits exercise and develope talent, and the constant contact of mind with mind, gives them a degree of intelligence perhaps above the average intellect of an

agricultural community. There is here little stagnation of thought; and hence their ignorance, if they be ignorant, will not be that of torpid, vacant minds. It will be ingenious, passionate, prurient; putting itself forth in forms of bold, reckless, destructive error. Uneducated mind in a manufacturing village will be emphatically "educated vice." The well known excitability too of such communities, may, under auspicious moral influences, be turned to the best account, as facts delightfully prove; or it may render them "rebel to all law," and qualify them to bid defiance to every religious and moral restraint, as leviathan laughs at the shaking of a spear. And when these splendid monuments of enterprise and art shall have become lazar-houses of corruption, should heaven in its wrath ever visit us with so dire a day, the nation will rue the riches which erected them, and the very extremities of the social system will wither beneath their corrupted and corrupting influence.

Our hope however is strong that such a day is never to arrive. There is much to invigorate this hope in the habits and institutions of the American people. The industrious tenants of our mills and workshops are aspiring to become themselves at no distant day proprietors. They are treading the same honorable path through which some have already reached the high places of power, and multitudes have acquired competent, if not affluent wealth.

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Few among them can be found at present, who are not looking forward to an eligible settlement in life, with little or no expectation that their present employments are to be the inheritance of their children. Among the unnumbered blessings of our social institutions, institutions whose glory it is that, like the laws of Providence, they are felt chiefly in the blessings which they diffuse, the constant though noiseless revolutions which society is undergoing are certainly among the foremost. With no law of entail, and no rights of primogeniture, there never can be an aristocracy among us, in any proper sense of the term. how great an extent are our rich men the artificers of their own fortunes. How seldom is a family distinguished by inherited wealth through more than one or two generations. The elements of society, like the particles in a mass of boiling fluid, are constantly changing places. In the ceaseless rotation of the wheel, those who are now deemed by themselves and others as at the bottom, are found, in the lapse of a few years of patient industry and enterprise, at the top. We cling to the hope that, under the operation of our social system, manufacturers will never become a distinct caste, doomed, as families, to mere mechanical toil, and aspiring to no higher education for themselves or their children than is requisite to make them convenient appendages of the machinery with which they work.

Again, the early education of a large proportion of

those who work in our manufactories, will go far to form and maintain among them all an elevated tone of moral feeling. In countries where these institutions have been complained of as hotbeds of vice, it is questionable whether the fact, if it be a fact, is to be ascribed so much to the simple influence of the system, as to the previous moral character of the people themselves. As long as one half or one third of the youth in these establishments enter them with the associations of well regulated and pious homes fresh about them, they will compose a leaven of vast and truly conservative power.

And then there is among the people at large an ever wakeful jealousy of abuses, which, even while it seems to slumber, is still watching with its hundred eyes against the encroachments of avarice in the employer on the rights and welfare of the employed. Public sentiment must be strangely deteriorated to tolerate the abuses from which most of the evils charged to these institutions in other countries have sprung.

It is matter of encouragement, that hitherto so healthy a public sentiment has been maintained in most of our manufacturing communities. Proof is wanting that in point of morality and social order, they are inferior to any other communities of equal extent and density, or even to an equal number of youth taken as they rise in a sparse and widely scattered population.

It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the same causes which expose the youth in these crowded resorts to peculiar temptations, facilitate also salutary moral appliances. Religious sympathies are rapidly communicated. The sanctuary and the Sabbath school are commonly more accessible than they can be in most of our country towns; and systems of religious effort can be made to bear upon those who have not become inured to the thrilling scenes of the conference room and the meeting for social prayer.

But the chief ground of our hope respecting the future character of these institutions, is in the fact that some of the largest of them have been the scenes of delightful and glorious revivals of religion. The Holy Spirit has hovered over these interesting spots, and hallowed them by his special presence. To not a few they have proved the very gate of heaven. Hundreds of youth might be named, who, after a few months' residence here, have returned to their friends with a new song put into their mouths, and who will through eternity recur to this, as the birth-place of their souls.

These are, confessedly the brighter aspects of the subject. It must be admitted that the tendency of the unbounded prosperity of the country is to create the same inequalities of wealth, which characterize society in many states of the old world. With the progress of refinement, and the more extended application of the principle of division of labor,

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