A single London house employs 3,000 hands in the town and immediate vicinity upon hosiery alone for its establishment.

Lace now seems to lead the way, and there are whole streets of factories and warehouses busy with its manufacture and sale.

Perhaps no fabric in the world ever tested the ingenuity and value of machinery like this.

The cost has been reduced, from the old hand-working to the present process, from three dollars to three cents a yard! I think no machinery yet invented has been endowed with more delicate functions of human reason and genius than that employed upon the flower-work of this subtle drapery.

Until I saw it with my own eyes, I had concluded that the machinery invented or employed in America for setting card- teeth was the most astute, and as nearly approaching the faculties of the human mind in its apparent thought-power, as it was reverent and safe to carry anything made of iron and steel, or made by man at all.