The Sun.
London, England, 1853-09-27 00:00:00

tune thereby ; he abides by the manufacture to
which he is so much indebted, and by the work-
men to whom he has always been one of the most
liberal of masters ; and commemorating, at this
dinner, his own arrival at his fiftieth year,
he commemorates also his son's attaining his
majority, and pledges, as it were, his family's
adherence to their father's course. One of the
pleasing arrangements, which we are certain will
be carried out to the letter, is that the new town
which he will build to accommodate his vast num-
ber of workmen, will include every possible de-
vice for cottage cleanliness and comfort, and
everything needful for their intellectual and re-
ligious improvement. Our landed aristocracy
may learn something here. At the dinner, to
which 3,200 persons sat down, 2,500 of them
Mr. SALT'S operatives, we observe that the Earl
of HAREwoonand other notables of the West Hiding
were present. They will carry home some valuable
instruction, as well as a lasting recollection
of the noble-mindedness of the lord of the feast.
They will meditate plans for improving and ele-
vating the peasantry on their own estates—they
will learn to disbelieve (if they ever believed it)
the vulgar rant about the hard-heartedness of
manufacturers as a class, and will perceive that
the best feelings of feudal generosity are compat-
ible with manufacturing pursuits, and with the
independence enjoyed by manufacturing opera-
tives. Mr. SALT will at rice create a town far
'.arger than half the condemned boroughs which
return a member or two to the Imperial Legisla-
ture, and with ten times the intelligence of a
Thetford or an Arundel. It may almost be num-
bered amongst the triumphs of steam that it can
create Parliamentary boroughs in a year or two,
or at least towns which consign scores of those
boroughs to positive insignificance.
If it is pleasant to see that this wonder-working
power can bring landlords and mill-owners into
social intercourse, honourable to both sides, it is
not less remarkable that it bids fair ere long to
merge the two great classes in the one class of
manufacturers. In one aspect it is exalting the
present manufacturers to a level with the lords of
the soil—in the other it is converting the
landlords themselves into master manufac-
turers, and their farms into manufactories.
The day after Mr. SALT'S princely Idle, Mr.
MECHI was the invited guest of the Herts Agricul-
tural Association. An Earl, and a Baron, and
so forth, were assembled, in expectation of the
speech of the day from a London tradesman ; one
who had made an irruption from the counter
(with wealth amassed there) into the broad acres
of the territorial aristocracy. Nor did the guest
disappoint the nobility and squires who had invited
him, and invited him evidently to stimulate their
own tenants. He dealt out wholesome suggestions
to landlords with large estates complaining of want
of capital to improve, honestly advising them to
sell part of their land, and improve the rest with

the money. He rebuked tenants, who, clinging
to the old ways, grudged the landlord a fair inte-
rest for the money he laid out, but the burden of
his speech was Steam. The amount cf steam
power in any agricultural district he took as the
test of its condition. People thought him crazy
when he first put up a steam engine ; but now,
two makers in the village had more than they
could do to supply the neighbourhood fast enough.
Lincolnshire and Norfolk farmers have, some of
them one, two, and even three engines on a farm !
Herts had but made a beginning ; he was sure
they would soon get deeper into it. But the
grand agricultural achievement of steam is yet to
come. Its advent is nigh. Mr. MECHI is now
building the engine, at a cost of 2001., which is to
plough the land, and to do almost everything else
besides. A Canadian engineer, neglected in his
! own province, is working at Tiptree, under Mr.
MEcui's patronage ; soon the implement is to be
ready which is to revolutionise British agri-
culture, to enable farmers to plough twelve inches
deep instead of five inches, and to benefit agri-
culture to the tune of ten millions of pounds per
annum, ! What are all the Budgets of rival
Chancellors of the Exchequer to this ? His guests,
the gentlemen of the top-boots and gaiters at least,
were withheld, either by utter blank astonishment,
or by not having heard so much Latin, from ex-
claiming Credat Judaws A pclla ! However, the
sober truth remains, that we have now farms in
which steam does all the fixed machinery work,
that such farms are increasing in number, and
that machinery of every kind is so rapidly ex-
tending that the farm is fast assimilating to the
manufactory ; and that the farmer and his labour-
ers bid fair in another generation to equal in in-
telligence their brethren of the towns.