A race-question of a character that cannot be supplied by differentiation within Caucasian limits haunts us as it has done from the very birth of the colonies. Like the Wild Huntsman, we have had the sable spectre close beside us through the whole run. But, more fortunate than he, we see it begin to fade. At least its outlines are contracting. The ratio of colored inhabitants to the aggregate, in 1790 19.26 per cent., or one-fifth, fell in 1860 to 14.12, or one-seventh, and in 1870 to 12.65, or an eighth. The next census will beyond doubt point more strongly in the same direction. If, whilst dwindling in magnitude, the dusky shape perplex us by assuming suddenly a novel form, we may yet be assured that it is the same in substance and in manageability. Its hue is whitening with the fleece of five millions of cotton bales. The cloud has a silver lining—a golden one in fact—for ours is pecuniarily a serviceable phantom to the extent of adding to our annual income a sum equal to eight or ten times the entire yearly export of the colonies. Should he lead us, like the Land—und—Wild—Graf, into the pit of ruin, he will have first bottomed it with an ample and soft cushion of lint whereon to fall.
Extremes meet, and modern culture, like ancient anarchy, drives its people into cities. Such is the tendency on both sides of the ocean. Improvement must result from associated effort, and of that cities are the last expression. All the European towns are outgrowing the rural districts. With us the change states itself in an advance, since 1790, of the city population from 3.4 to 20.9 per cent. of the aggregate. Broadcloth has gained on homespun in the proportion of six to one, Giles having thus six mouths to fill where he formerly had but one. We shall show farther on how gallantly he meets this draft. New York, with its suburbs, contains more Germans than any German city save Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than Dublin, and more English-speaking inhabitants than Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds together. All the colonial towns in a lump would scarce add a twentieth to her numbers, and her militia embraces nearly twice as many men as served, first and last, in the Continental army.
But the column that sums the souls does not state the complete life of the cities. Man has in our day a host of allies that work with him and at his command— slaves of iron, steel and brass wholly unknown to our great—grand-fathers— fed also by the farmer, through the miner as an intermediate. Steam-engines, to the number of 40,191, and of 1,215,711 horse-power—all of the stationary variety, and exclusive of nearly half as many that traverse the country and may be classed among the rural population—have succeeded the websters and spinners who were wont to clothe all the world and his wife, and who survive only in the surnames of some of our statesmen and financiers. Not that they confine their labors to textile fabrics. Their iron fingers are in every pie, including that of the printer, who is answered, when he calls the roll of his serfs of steam, by 691 whistles. And he is one of the smallest of the slaveholders—a mere ten-bale man. India-rubber, a product known a century ago only by some little black lumps used by draughtsmen to erase pencil-marks, owns enough of them to equal 4412 horses or 22,000 No. 1 field hands. Boots and shoes not of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the Revolutionary type and more solid and durable. As a cord-wainer Steam is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on, and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate zone. Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod, however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by the old system. Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay, Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on cotton or undressed human skin. Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057 makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!
But we do Mr. Watt's lusty bantling injustice in assigning him exclusively the tastes of a cit. He is not insensible to pastoral charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver. Here he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice bits of the grove. The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts. 'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc. Armed with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together, withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible to do with wood. And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.
The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies. It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture of iron or anything else. In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of £200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace. Lest the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that functionary to a personal forfeit of £500 for failing, within thirty days after presentment by two witnesses on oath, to abate as a nuisance every such mill, engine, etc. As this mulct would have made a serious inroad on the emoluments of the royal governors, even with the addition of the inaugural douceur customarily given by the provincial assemblies to each new incumbent—in Virginia regularly £500, doubled in the instance of Fauquier in 1758, when it was desired to drive the entering wedge of disestablishment and razee the parsons—we are prepared to believe that the iron business was not flourishing. Under a despotism tempered so very moderately by bribes, a similar blight fell upon all other branches of manufacture. Among these, wool, flax, paper, hats and leather are specified in a Parliamentary report as interfering with "the trade, navigation and manufactures" of the mother-country. An act of Parliament accordingly forbade the exportation of hats to foreign countries, and even from one colony to another.
That, after such a course of repression, the country found itself wholly unprepared on the attainment of independence to make any headway in this field, is no matter of surprise. Thirty years elapsed before the manufacturing statistics of the Union became presentable. In 1810 they were reckoned at $198,613,471. This embraces every fruit of handicraft, from a barrel of flour and a bushel of lime to a silk dress. We had 122,647 spindles and 325,392 looms, made 53,908 tons of pig iron, and refined about one pound of sugar for each head of the population. In 1870, after sixty years of tossing between the Scylla and Charybdis of tariffs, "black" and white, the yield of our factories had mounted to the respectable sum of $4,232,325,442. They employed 2,053,996 operatives. Of these, the average wages were $377, against $289 in 1860 and $247 in 1850, yearly. The advance in the product of refined sugar may be cited as illustrative of the progress of the people in comfort and luxury. It reached a value of one hundred and nine millions, representing nearly ten times as many pounds, or twenty-eight pounds a head. This exemplification is but one in an endless list.
Manufactures have come to figure respectably in our exports. They exceed in that list, by three or four to one, the entire exports of all kinds in 1790; and they equal the average aggregate of the years from 1815 to 1824. But the multiplication of the wants of a people rapidly growing in numbers and refinement will, with the comparatively high price of labor, scarcity of capital and distance of most of our ports from the markets supplied by European manufactures, for a long time to come make the home-supply the chief care of our artisans. They have, for such and other reasons, in some points lost ground of late. The revolution in the propulsion and construction of ships, for instance, has not found them prepared to take the advantage they have usually done of improvements. Not only do the British screw-steamers take undisputed possession of our trade with their own country, but they expel our once unrivaled craft from the harbors of other quarters of the globe, and threaten to monopolize the most profitable part of our carrying-trade with all countries. This result is more easily explained than the inroads made on our more ordinary foreign traffic, in sailing vessels, by the mercantile marine of second- and third-rate powers. This is eloquently told by the annual government returns and the daily shipping-list. While our coastwise tonnage increases, that employed in foreign trade remains stationary or declines. The bearing of this upon our naval future becomes an imperative question for our merchants and legislators. The United States is benevolently and gratuitously building up a marine for each of half a dozen European states which possess little or no commerce of their own, and multiplying the ships and sailors of our chief maritime rival. We have long since ceased to import locomotives, and have, within the past two years, almost ceased to import railroad iron. Our iron-workers obtain coal at nearly or quite as low prices as do those of Birkenhead or the Clyde. They have recently sent to sea some large screw-steamers that perform well. No insurmountable difficulty appears to prevent the launching of more until we have enough to serve at least our direct trade with Europe and China. That determined, it may be possible to ascertain whether we cannot assist Norway, Belgium and Sicily in carrying our cotton, wheat and tobacco to the purchasers of it.