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elusive right to be employed, and the higher rate of pay whichhe is privileged to exact. The farmers confine themselves toproduction, and the miller becomes their merchant, or their mer-chant’s manufacturer.
Considering the scarcity of capital when corn-mills began to beerected, the over proportion of them to the work to be executed(necessary from the unpermeable state of roads, in order thatthe work might be executed at all), with the peculiar favour theLegislature seems ever to have been inclined to show to everyspecies of manufacture, whether more necessary or more super-fluous ; it will not be matter of surprise that erectors of millsshould have required, as the conditions of their erection, both acertainty and considerable extent of employment, and at a highrate of wages,—nor that the Legislature should have anxiouaysanctioned all those privileges,—nor that the judges should havebeen ready to bestow upon them a liberal interpretation.
From the ready access to all parts of the country, at alt distan-ces, by roads, there is now no need of supporting more machin-ery than what can find constant and full employment: from thepresent improved state of machinery, every machine, too, isnow capable of performing much more work than formerly.From these causes, although there is now surely much moregrain to be manufactured, there is a superfluity of corn-mills,which could not be supported but by the compulsatory employ-ment obtained through adstriction.
The multiplicity of corn-mills going by water (the only mov-ing power knou’n at the time of erection), is complained of as anuisance in other respects. They interrupt the profitable use ofwater, for the purposes of irrigation ; they often prevent thedraining of lands, by preventing the descent of waters; theyconvert low lands into marshes, from the leakage of mill-pondsand mill-leads. As the whole of corn-mill machinery might bemoved by the powers of steam or of wind equally well, and of-ten equally cheap as by water, and as there is no dread of nothaving machinery erected voluntarily, wherever there is a realdemand for its employment; it might not be improper that a le-gislative compulsator should be interposed, enforcing the sale ofthe privilege of having a water-mill, at a fair valuation, where-ver it could be properly instructed, before a proper court, bythose having interest in, and applying for the purchase, that thebenefit to result from undamming of the waters, or convertingthem to the purposes of irrigation, exceeded the rent of the mil}liy one half or one whole, or some such other over proportion.