n that must always remain in force, unless a second
fiddler, equally adventurous and more successful, should return with
an accurate report of the true state of the fact.

_Mr Foster._
What think you of the little colony we have just been inspecting; a
city, as it were, in its cradle?

_Mr Escot._
With all the weakness of infancy, and all the vices of maturer age. I
confess, the sight of those manufactories, which have suddenly sprung
up, like fungous excrescences, in the bosom of these wild and desolate
scenes, impressed me with as much horror and amazement as the sudden
appearance of the stocking manufactory struck into the mind of
Rousseau, when, in a lonely valley of the Alps, he had just
congratulated himself on finding a spot where man had never been.

_Mr Foster._
The manufacturing system is not yet purified from some evils which
necessarily attend it, but which I conceive are greatly overbalanced
by their concomitant advantages. Contemplate the vast sum of human
industry to which this system so essentially contributes: seas covered
with vessels, ports resounding with life, profound researches,
scientific inventions, complicated mechanism, canals carried over deep
valleys, and through the bosoms of hills: employment and existence
thus given to innumerable families, and the multiplied comforts and
conveniences of life diffused over the whole community.

_Mr Escot._
You present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and
require me to admire it. Seas covered with vessels: every one of which
contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves,
ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief. Ports
resounding with life: in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the
mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution. Profound
researches, scientific inventions: to what end? To contract the sum of
human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate
independence, liberty, and health? No; to multiply factitious desires,
to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent unnatural wants, to heap up
incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish
and ruinous profusion. Complicated machinery: behold its blessings.
Twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sate the good woman
with her spinning-wheel: the children, if not more profitably employed
than in gathering heath and sticks, at least laid in a stock of health
and strength to s