The Times quotes from the Warehousemen's and Drapers' Trade Journal
remarkable evidence that English manufacturers are, at length, succeeding in applying the automatic machinery now so much in use in America, at least thus far,—that they can continue manufacturing all night without the aid of any human labour, except the engine-man's needed to feed the engine that works all the part of this machinery. The machinery in question is set up at Oak Mills, near Low Moor, in the immediate vicinity of Bradford, and the building in which the manufacture goes on is empty of all human agency throughout the night. In a neighbouring building, connected with it solely by a hole in the wall, is the engine, and here there is necessarily an attendant to keep the fire up and the boiler properly filled ; but the manufacture is completely automatic, and the machinery turns out, it is said, a great variety of beautiful articles in silk, wool, and cotton, made on a great many different patterns, with- out a soul to watch the process. It is, indeed, like the manu- facturing processes of nature herself, which certainly go on quite as readily without spectators as with them. But even nature cannot do much that is useful for us without prompters, without persons to bias her energy in special directions ; and, there is no more danger, we presume, that automatic machinery will tend ultimately to diminish the number of labourers required to reap fully its fruits, than there is that crops will ever be sown and tended and reaped without farmers and market-gardeners and vine-dressers, and many other kinds of skilled labour, often of a highly-elaborate kind.
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