a "poor house," by the reflection that there
"were the more to come next night;" so,
because our ancestors have not used up the
natural resources of Dartmoor, we of
today, may flatter ourselves with the pleasing
fact, that they have left it all for our use and
advantage.

The dependence of so vast a proportion of
our whole population upon the manufacture
of textile fabrics, is a mote in our horizon,
which has long troubled the mind's eye of the
social economist. The greater the number of
branches over which the national industry is
diffused, the less are the workers at the
mercy of the vicissitudes of each. A failure
in the cotton-crop, as we showed in a recent
article, produces misery to millions. If the
silkworms sicken, or sheep die, whole counties
are reduced to idleness, want, and crime.
We are already warned of the danger of
too absolute a reliance upon the United States
for a supply of the raw material of our
staple manufacture; and the competition of
foreign producers in a fabric, in the production
of which we do not command superiority
in natural advantages, has already driven us
out of many neutral markets, and compelled
us to seek new customers.

It is the peculiar excellence of the
manufacture of porcelain and other earthenware,
that the increasing wealth, civilisation, and
luxury of mankind, renders the consumption
of articles which have risen from the rank of
luxuries to that of necessaries of domestic
life, capable of almost indefinite increase;
that our native producers have already
carried the art to such a point that while in
the year 1849 we imported only thirty-
two thousand pounds worth of earthenware,
we exported sixty-one million pieces of the
declared value of eight hundred and seven
thousand pounds; while there is no
department of national industry which calls into
requisition such a variety of trades and
occupations. The raw materials of the manufacture,
and its ancillary appliances, are all
within the island itself, and none of them
depend for their supply upon the vicissitudes
of the seasons. The coal it consumes, and its
transport, enrich the proprietor, the miner,
the porter, and the carrier by land and water.
Pottery is a bulky article, and occupies in its
inland or foreign transport our packers, railways,
canals, and shipping. The production
and carriage of the clay, flint, and collateral
substances which form its elements, and
which are all yielded by our own territory,
afford employment to our labourers of the
most extensive kind, and large profits to our
landowners and capitalists; while Science and
Art are liberally encouraged by a process which
calls into active requisition the inventive skill
of the mechanician, the discoveries of the
chemist, the thaumaturgic dexterity of the
artisan and modeller, the taste of the colourist
and designer, and the higher genius of the
painter and the sculptor.

While candour would call upon us to
concede to foreign nations an equality with our
own in the higher attainments of abstract
science, it is the peculiar excellence of our
philosophers that their genius and knowledge
are reproductive, and that having compelled
Nature to yield up to them her secrets, they
have the ability to apply them to practical
and profitable uses. It is also the
providential characteristic of scientific discovery,
that it is generally found to subserve, not
its direct object merely, but to be ancillary
to the further development of the
advantages of former inventions.

When Mr. Reece's experiments shall have
been sufficiently confided in by the commercial
public, to induce capitalists to convert his
experiments into facts, Mr. Reece will not
only substantially centuple the value of
the soil and surface of Dartmoor, but the
success of his experiments will have the effect
of removing the "overburden" (as the supersoil
is technically termed by miners) from the
mineral substances which it now encumbers, not
only without the present heavy cost, but with
positive profit. The fire clay, the granite, and
porcelain clay which lie immediately below
the peat range of Lee Moor, may now be
produced at a diminished expense, and thereby
cheapen the raw material to the manufacturer,
the first condition of an extended demand for
his earthenware.

No discovery could come more opportunely
for the weal of the experiment of rendering
convict labour productive without injury to
the honest poor. Criminals may be put
to the rough work of digging and piling
the peat, and of after-draining, dividing, and
enclosing the open moor, to fit it for
agricultural purposes. Where now the bittern
and the fox contend with the moorland sheep
for a scanty subsistence, we may expect to
see fertile farms and waving corn; while the
wealth which lies under the surface will be in
full action of development, to the practical
effect of adding four hundred and twenty
square miles to the productive acreage of
England. It is not, however, the sources of
wealth upon the earth at Dartmoor, but to
those under the earth, that we must look, to
convert the forbidding waste into a profitable
and genial territory—into, in short, a
DEVONSHIRE DORADO.

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