5 seems to be that Nature is laying in sunshine, with good husbandry, for another spring. The children break out of the little primary school-house, where New England planting is carried on too,—boys and girls trained to grow straight and sturdy, to handle some day the plough, the loom, or the musket, as the country needs. Now they are the finest of all the crops on the slopes which they shall one day inherit. What a ride you can take through the country lanes, bordered with nothing finer than the pendent barberry and the purpling sumach, unless you have an eye for the comfort, and thanksgiving, and popular Liberty, whose stateliness lines all the road, and stretches far away between the hills. When a people own the land, and own themselves, and consequently do not depend upon one product and one employment for their means of intelligence and happiness, they are superior to bad luck, and know little of the discomforts of a crisis. In this respect what a different sight meets the traveller who is passing to-day through the cotton districts of Lancashire, England, where a population of nearly three millions have their welfare entangled in the mill-machinery, and cease to hope as the factory chimnies cease to smoke. They are as much the slaves of the cotton-plant as the negroes who hoe it and gin its blossoms. They belong to a style of civilization which thinks little of man, but a great deal of trade ; which dooms a man all his life, and his children after him, to make the head of a pin, to pick under ground at a stratum of coal, to pull and ripple flax, or tend a machine in a mill. Take away his pin-head, his pick-axe, or fail to feed his machine with cotton, and he is a pauper ; he comes upon the parish for his daily support, or has a bowl of soup ladled out to him at the door of some charity. In Manchester, which has a population of 357,004, the pauperism is now 10| per cent., and out-door relief is distributed to 16,334 persons at the rate of Is. 4d. per head per week—about two shillings of our money. Out of eighty-four cotton mills, twenty-two are stopped, and thirty are working short time. But Manchester is comparatively well off. The town of Stockport, about six miles from Manchester, has, out of a population of 54,681, 18,000 engaged in the factories, in good times; but now there are only 4,000 working on full
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