else. Machinery is therefore resorted to; and waterwheels, steam engines, and all sorts of powers are set to work in moving hammers, turning rollers, and drawing rods and wires through holes, till every workman can have

the particular form which he wants. If it were not for the machinery that is employed in the manufacture, no man could obtain a spade for less than the price of a year's labour; the yokes of a horse would cost more than the horse himself; and the farmer would have to return to wooden ploughshares, and hoes made of sticks with crooked ends.

After all this, the iron is not yet fit for a knife, at least for such a knife as an Englishman may buy for a shilling. Many nations would, however, be thankful for a little bit of it, and nations too, in whose countries there is no want of iron-ore. But they have no knowledge of the method of

making iron, and have no furnaces or machinery. When our ships sail among the people of the eastern islands, those people do not ask for gold. "Iron, iron!" is the call; and he who can exchange his best commodity for a rusty nail or a bit of iron hoop is a fortunate individual.

We are not satisfied with that in the best form, which is a treasure to those people in the worst. We must have a knife, not of iron, but of steel,—a substance that will bear a keen edge without either breaking or bending. In order to get that, we must again change the nature of our material.

How is that to be done? The oftener that iron is heated and hammered, it becomes the softer and more ductile; and as the heating and hammering forced the carbon out of it, if we give it the carbon back again, we shall harden it; but it happens that we also give it other properties, by restoring its carbon, when the iron has once been in a ductile state.

For this purpose, bars or pieces of iron are buried in powdered charcoal, covered up in a vessel, and kept at a red heat for a greater or less number of hours, according to the object desired. There are niceties in the process, which it is not necessary to explain, that produce the peculiar quality of steel, as distinguished from cast-iron. If the operation of heating the iron in charcoal is continued too long, or the heat is too great, the iron becomes cast steel. and cannot be welded; but if it is not melted in the operation, it can be worked with the hammer in the same manner as iron.

In each case, however, it has acquired the property upon which the keenness of the knife depends; and the chief difference between the cast steel and the steel that can bear to be hammered is, that cast steel takes a keener edge, but is more easily broken.

The property which it has acquired is that of bearing to be tempered. If it be made very hot, and plunged into cold water, and kept there till it is quite cooled, it is so hard that it will cut iron, but it is brittle. In this state

the workman brightens the surface, and lays the steel upon a piece of hot iron, and holds it to the fire till it becomes of a colour which he knows from experience is a test of the proper state of the process. Then he plunges it again into water, and it has the degree of hardness that he wants.

The grinding a knife, and the polishing it, even when it has acquired the requisite properties of steel, if they were not done by machinery, would cost more than the whole price of a knife upon which machinery is used. A travelling knife-grinder, with his treadle and wheels, has a machine, but not a very perfect one. The Sheffield knife-maker grinds the knife at first upon wheels of immense size, turned by water or steam, and moving so quickly that they appear to stand still-the eye cannot follow the motion. With these aids the original grinding and polishing cost scarcely anything; while the travelling knife-grinder charges two pence for the labour of himself and his wheel in just sharpening it.

The "Sheffield whittle" is as old as the time of Edward III., as we know from the poet Chaucer. Sheffield is still the metropolis of steel. It is in the change of iron into steel by a due admixture of carbon-by hammering, by casting, by melting-that the natural powers of Sheffield, her water and her coal, have become of such value. Wherever there is a stream with a fall, there is the grinding-wheel at work and in hundreds of workshops the nicer labour of the artificer is fashioning the steel into every instrument which the art of man can devise, from the scythe of the mower to the lancet of the surgeon. The machinery that made the steel has called into action the skill that makes the filecutter. No machine can make a file. The file-cutter with a small hammer can cut notch after notch in a piece of softened steel, without a guide or gauge,-even to the number of a hundred notches in an inch. It is one out of many things in which skilled labour triumphs over the uniformity of operation which belongs to a machine. This

is one, also, of the numerous instances in which it is evident that the application of machinery to the arts calls into action an almost infinite variety of handicrafts. An ordinary workman can obtain a knife for the price of a few hours' labour. The causes are easily seen. Every part of the labour that can be done by machinery is so done. One turn of a wheel, one stroke of a steam-engine, one pinch of a pair of rollers, or one blow of a die, will do more in a second than a man could do in a month. One man, also, has but one thing to do in connection with the machinery; and when the work of the hand succeeds to the work of the wheel or the roller, the one man, like the file-cutter, has still but one thing to do. In the course of time he comes to do twenty times as much as if he were constantly shifting from one thing to another. The value of the work that a man does is not to be measured in all cases by the time and trouble that it cost him individually, but by the market value of what he produces; which value is determined, as far as labour is concerned, by the price paid for doing it in the best and most expeditious mode.

And does not all this machinery, and this economy of labour, it may still be said, deprive many workmen of employment? No. By these means the iron trade gives bread to hundreds, where otherwise it would not have given bread to one. There are more hands employed at the iron-works than there would have been if there had been no machinery; because without machinery men could not produce iron cheap enough to be generally used.

The machinery that is now employed in the iron trade, not only enables the people to be supplied cheaply with all sorts of articles of iron, but it enables a great number of people to find employment, not in the iron trade only, but in all other trades, who otherwise could not have been employed; and it enables everybody to do more work with the same exertion by giving them better tools; while it makes all more comfortable by furnishing them with more commodious domestic utensils.

There are thousands of families on the face of the earth that would be glad to exchange all they have for a tin kettle, or an iron pot, which can be bought anywhere in the three kingdoms for a shilling or two. And could the poor man in this country but once see how even the rich man in some other places must toil day after day before he can scrape or grind a stone so as to be able to boil a little water in it, or make it serve for a lamp, he would account himself a poor man no more. An English gipsy carries

about with him more of the conveniences of life than are enjoyed by the chiefs or rulers in countries which naturally have much finer climates than that of England. But they have no machinery, and therefore they are wretched.

Great Britain is a country rich in other minerals than iron-stone and coal. Our earliest ancestors are recorded to have exchanged tin with maritime people who came to our shores. They had lead also, which was cast into oblong blocks during the Roman occupation of the island, and which bear the imperial stamp. At the beginning of the eighteenth century we worked tin into pewter, which, in the shape of plates, had superseded wooden trenchers. But we raised and smelted no copper, importing it unwrought. The valuable tin and copper mines of Cornwall were imperfectly worked in the middle of the last century, because the water which overflowed them was only removed by hydraulic engines, the best of which was introduced in 1700. When Watt had reconstructed the steam-engine, steampower began to be employed in draining the Cornwall mines.

In all mining operations, conducted as they are in modern times, and in our own country, we must either go without the article produced, whether coal, or iron, or lead, or copper, if the machines were abolished, or we must employ human labour, in works the most painful, at a price which would not only render existence unbearable, but destroy it altogether. The people, in that case, would be in the condition of the unhappy natives of South America, when the Spaniards resolved to get gold at any cost of