Lippincotts Magazine, March 1876 | Page 5

therefore so brilliant in the light of the
nineteenth century. As this light, nevertheless, is that in which we live,

move and have our being, we must accept it, and turn to substantials,
wrought and unwrought.
On our way to this feast of solids we must step for a moment into St.
Paul's and listen to the great commemorative concert of sixty-five
hundred voices that swept all cavilers, foreign and domestic, off their
feet, brought tears to the most sternly critical eye, and caused the
composer, Cramer, to exclaim, as he looked up into the great dome,
filled with the volume of harmony, "Cosa stupenda! stupenda! La
gloria d'Inghilterra!"
A transition, indeed, from this to coal and iron--from a concord of
sweet sounds to the rumble into hold, car and cart of thirty-five
millions of tons of coal and two and a half millions of iron, the yearly
product at that time of England! She has since doubled that of iron, and
nearly trebled her extract of coal, whatever her progress in the harvest
of good music and good pictures. Forced by economical necessity and
assisted by chemistry, she makes her fuel, too, go a great deal farther
than it did in 1851, when the estimate was that eighty-one per cent. of
that consumed in iron-smelting was lost, and when the "duty" of a
bushel of coal burnt in a steam-engine was less than half what it now is.
The United States have the benefit of these improvements, at the same
time that their yield of coal has swelled from four millions of tons at
that time to more than fifty now, and of iron in a large though not equal
ratio. The Lake Superior region, which rested its claims on a sample of
its then annual product of one hundred tons of copper, now exports
seven hundred thousand tons of iron ore.
Steel, now replacing iron in some of its heaviest uses, appeared as
almost an article of luxury in the shape of knives, scissors and the like.
The success of the Hindus in its production was quite envied and
admired, though they had probably advanced little since Porus deemed
thirty pounds a present fit for Alexander; their rude appliances beating
Sheffield an hour and a half in the four hours demanded by the most
adroit forgers of the city of whittles for its elimination from the warm
bath of iron and carbon. Bessemer, with his steel-mines, as his furnaces
at the ore-bank may be termed, was then in the future. The steel rails
over which we now do most of our traveling were undreamed of. Bar
iron did duty on all the eighty-eight hundred miles of American and
sixty-five hundred of British railway; not many, if at all, more than are

now laid, in this country at least, with steel. This poetic and historic
metal has become as truly a raw product as potatoes. The poets will
have to drop it. The glory of Toledo--of her swords bent double in the
scabbard, of her rapiers that bore into one's interior only the titillating
sensation of a spoonful of vanilla ice, and of her decapitating sabres
that left the culprit whole so long as he forbore to sneeze--is trodden
under foot of men.
[Illustration: DUBLIN EXHIBITION BUILDING, 1853.]
In crude materials the Union is at home. It was so in 1851, and is still;
but then it was not so much at home in anything else as now. We have
advanced in that field too, since we sent no silver, and from Colorado
no gold, no canned fruits, meats or fish, and no wine but some
Cincinnati Catawba, thin and acid, according to the verdict of the
imbibing jury. We adventured timidly into manufacturing competition
with the McCormick reaper, which all Europe proceeded straightway to
pirate; ten or twelve samples of cotton and three of woolen goods;
Ericsson's caloric-engine; a hydrostatic pump; some nautical
instruments; Cornelius's chandeliers for burning lard oil--now the light
of other days, thanks to our new riches in kerosene; buggies of a tenuity
so marvelous in Old-World eyes that their half-inch tires were likened
to the miller of Ferrette's legs, so thin that Talleyrand pronounced his
standing an act of the most desperate bravery; soap enough to answer
Coleridge's cry for a detergent for the lower Rhine; and one bridge
model, forerunner of the superb iron erections that have since leaped
over rivers and ravines in hundreds.
Meagre enough was the display of our craftsmen by the side of that
made by their brethren of the other side. It could have been scarce
visible to Britannia, looking down from a pinnacle of calico ready for a
year's export over and above her home consumption, long enough, if
unrolled, to put a girdle thirty times round the globe,