out twice as light in draught as
the lightest of English machines of the same description, doing as much,
if not more work than the best of them, and with much less power; dressing
the grain, which they do not, and which can be profitably disposed of at
one half, or at least one third less money than its British rivals"--and
is thus enabled to purchase books. Centralization, on the other hand,
furnishes the English farmer, according to the same authority, "with
machines strong and dear enough to rob him of all future improvements, and
tremendously heavy, either to work or to draw;" and thus deprives him of
all power to educate his children, or to purchase for himself either books
or newspapers.

Religious decentralization exerts also a powerful influence on the
arrangements for imparting that instruction which provides purchasers for
books. The Methodist Society, with its gigantic operations; the
Presbyterian Board of Publication; the Baptist Association; the
Sunday-school, and other societies, are all incessantly at work creating
readers. The effect of all these efforts for the dissemination of cheap
knowledge is shown in the first instance in the number of semi-monthly,
monthly, and quarterly journals, representing every shade of politics and
religion, and every department of literature and science.

The number of these returned to the census was 175; but that must, I
think, have been even then much below the truth. Since then it has been
much increased. Of two of them, Putnam's and Harper's, the first
exclusively original, and the latter about two thirds so, the sale is
about two millions of numbers per annum; while of three others, published
in Philadelphia, it is about a million. Cheap as are these journals, at
twenty-five cents each, the sum total of the price paid for them by the
consumers is about $700,000. The quantity of paper required for a single
one of them is about 16,000 reams of double medium, being one tenth as
much as has recently been given as the consumption of the whole newspaper
press of Great Britain and Ireland. Every pursuit in life, and almost
every shade of opinion, has its periodical. A single city in Western New
York furnishes no less than four agricultural and horticultural journals,
one of them published weekly, with a circulation of 15,000, and the
others, monthly, with a joint circulation of 25,000. The "Merchants'
Magazine," which set the example for the one now published in London, has