Houses—The pyramids—Mechanical power—Carpenters' tools—American machinery for building—Bricks—Slate—Household fittings and furniture—Paper-hangings—Carpets—Glass—Pottery—Improvements effected through the reduction or repeal of duties on domestic requirements.

The beaver builds his huts with the tools which nature has given him. He gnaws pieces of wood in two with his sharp teeth, so sharp that the teeth of a similar animal, the agouti, form the only cutting-tool which some rude nations possess. When the beavers desire to move a large piece of wood, they join in a body to drag it along.

Man has not teeth that will cut wood: but he has reason, which directs him to the choice of much more perfect tools.

Some of the great monuments of antiquity, such as the pyramids of Egypt, are constructed of enormous blocks of stone brought from distant quarries. We have no means of estimating, with any accuracy, the mechanical knowledge possessed by the people engaged in these works. It was, probably, very small, and, consequently, the human labour employed in such edifices was not only enormous in quantity, but exceedingly painful to the workmen. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, a Greek writer who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, hated the memory of the kings who built the pyramids. He tells us that the great pyramid occupied a hundred thousand men for twenty years in its erection, without counting the workmen who were employed in hewing the stones, and in conveying them to the spot where the pyramid was built. Herodotus speaks of this work as a torment to the people; and doubtless the labour engaged in raising huge masses of stone, that was extensive enough to employ a hundred thousand men for twenty years, which is equal to two millions of men for one year, must have been fearfully tormenting without machinery, or with very imperfect machinery. It has been calculated that about half the steam-engines of England, worked by thirty-six thousand men, would raise the same quantity of stones from the quarry, and elevate them to the same height as the great pyramid, in the short time of eighteen hours. The people of Egypt groaned for twenty years under this enormous work. The labourers groaned because they were sorely taxed; and the rest of the people groaned because they had to pay the labourers. The labourers lived, it is true, upon the wages of their labour, that is, they were paid in food—kept like horses—as the reward of their work. Herodotus says that it was recorded on the pyramid that the onions, radishes, and garlic which the labourers consumed, cost sixteen hundred talents of silver: an immense sum, equivalent to several million pounds. But the onions, radishes, and garlic, the bread, and clothes of the labourer, were wrung out of the profitable labour of the rest of the people. The building of the pyramid was an unprofitable labour. There was no immediate or future source of produce in the pyramid; it produced neither food, nor fuel, nor clothes, nor any other necessary. The labour of a hundred thousand men for twenty years, stupidly employed upon this monument, without an object beyond that of gratifying the pride of the tyrant who raised it, was a direct tax upon the profitable labour of the rest of the people.

But admitting that it is sometimes desirable for nations and governments to erect monuments which are not of direct utility,—which may have an indirect utility in recording the memory of great exploits, or in producing feelings of reverence or devotion,—it is clearly an advantage that these works, as well as all other works, should be performed in the cheapest manner; that is, that human labour should derive every possible assistance from mechanical aid. We will give an illustration of the differences of the application of mechanical aid in one of the first operations of building, the moving a block of stone. The following statements are the result of actual experiment upon a stone weighing ten hundred and eighty pounds.

To drag this stone along the smoothed floor of the quarry required a force equal to seven hundred and fifty-eight pounds. The same stone dragged over a floor of planks required six hundred and fifty-two pounds. The same stone placed on a platform of wood, and dragged over the same floor of planks, required six hundred and six pounds. When the two surfaces of wood were soaped as they slid over each other, the force required to drag the stone was reduced to one hundred and eighty-two pounds. When the same stone was placed upon rollers three inches in diameter, it required, to put it in motion along the floor of the quarry, a force only of thirty-four pounds; and by the same rollers upon a wooden floor, a force only of twenty-eight pounds. Without any mechanical aid, it would require the force of four or five men to set that stone in motion. With the mechanical aid of two surfaces of wood soaped, the same weight might be moved by one man. With the more perfect mechanical aid of rollers, the same weight might be moved by a very little child.

From these statements it must be evident that the cost of a block of stone very much depends upon the quantity of labour necessary to move it from the quarry to the place where it is wanted to be used. We have seen that with the simplest mechanical aid labour may be reduced sixty-fold. With more perfect mechanical aid, such as that of water-carriage, the labour may be reduced infinitely lower. Thus, the streets of London are paved with granite from Scotland at a moderate expense.

The cost of timber, which enters so largely into the cost of a house, is in a great degree the cost of transport. In countries where there are great forests, timber-trees are worth nothing where they grow, except there are ready means of transport. In many parts of North America, the great difficulty which the people find is in clearing the land of the timber. The finest trees are not only worthless, but are a positive incumbrance, except when they are growing upon the banks of a great river; in which case the logs are thrown into the water, or formed into rafts, being floated several hundred miles at scarcely any expense. The same stream which carries them to a seaport turns a mill to saw the logs into planks; and when sawn into planks the timber is put on shipboard, and carried to distant countries where timber is wanted. Thus mechanical aid alone gives a value to the timber, and by so doing employs human labour. The stream that floats the tree, the sawing-mill that cuts it, the ship that carries it across the sea, enable men profitably to employ themselves in working it. Without the stream, the mill, and the ship, those men would have no labour, because none could afford to bring the timber to their own doors.

What an infinite variety of machines, in combination with the human hand, is found in a carpenter's chest of tools! The skilful hand of the workman is the power which sets these machines in motion; just as the wind or the water is the power of a mill, or the elastic force of vapour the power of a steam-engine. When Mr. Boulton, the partner of the great James Watt, waited upon George III. to explain one of the improvements of the steam-engine which they had effected, the king said to him, "What do you sell, Mr. Boulton?" and the honest engineer answered, "What kings, sire, are all fond of—power." There are people at Birmingham who let out power, that is, there are people who have steam-engines who will lend the use of them, by the day or the hour, to persons who require that saving of labour in their various trades; so that a person who wants the strength of a horse, or half a horse, to turn a wheel for grinding, or for setting a lathe in motion, hires a room, or part of a room, in a mill, and has just as much as he requires. The power of a carpenter is in his hand, and the machines moved by that power are in his chest of tools. Every tool which he possesses has for its object to reduce labour, to save material, and to ensure accuracy—the objects of all machines. What a quantity of waste both of time and stuff is saved by his foot-rule! and when he chalks a bit of string and stretches it from one end of a plank to the other, to jerk off the chalk from the string, and thus produce an unerring line upon the face of the plank, he makes a little machine which saves him great labour. Every one of his hundreds of tools, capable of application to a vast variety of purposes, is an invention to save labour. Without some tool the carpenter's work could not be done at all by the human hand. A knife would do very laboriously what is done very quickly by a hatchet. The labour of using a hatchet, and the material which it wastes, are saved twenty times over by the saw. But when the more delicate operations of carpentry are required—when the workman uses his planes, his rabbet-planes, his fillisters, his bevels, and his centre-bits—what an infinitely greater quantity of labour is economized, and how beautifully that work is performed, which, without them, would be rough and imperfect! Every boy of mechanical ingenuity has tried with his knife to make a boat; and with a knife only it is the work of weeks. Give him a chisel, and a gouge, and a vice to hold his wood, and the little boat is the work of a day. Let a boy try to make a round wooden box, with a lid, having only his knife, and he must be expert indeed to produce anything that will be neat and serviceable. Give him a lathe and chisels, and he will learn to make a tidy box in half an hour. Nothing but absolute necessity can render it expedient to use an imperfect tool instead of a perfect. We sometimes see exhibitions of carving, "all done with the common penknife." Professor Willis has truly said, with reference to such weak boasting, "So far from admiring, we should pity the vanity and folly of such a display; and the more, if the work should show a natural aptitude in the workman: for it is certain that, if he has made good work with a bad tool, he would make better with a good one."

The Emperor Maximilian, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, ordered a woodcut to be engraved that should represent the carpentry operations of his time and country. This prince was, no doubt, proud of the advance of Germany in the useful arts. If the President of the United States were thus to record the advance of the republic of which he is the chief, he would show us his saw-mills and his planing-mills. The German carpenters, as we see, are reducing a great slab of wood into shape by the saw and the adze. The Americans have planing-mills, with cutters that make 4000 revolutions, and which plane boards eighteen feet long at the rate of fifty feet, per minute; and while the face of the board is planed, it is tongued and grooved at the same time—that is, one board is made to fit closely into another. But the Americans carry machinery much farther into the business of carpentry. Mr. Whitworth tells us that "many works in various towns are occupied exclusively in making doors, window-frames, or staircases, by means of self-acting machinery, such as planing, tenoning, morticing, and jointing machines. They are able to supply builders with various parts of the wood-work required in building at a much cheaper rate than they can produce them in their own workshops without the aid of such machinery."

By the use of those machines we are told that twenty men can make panelled doors at the rate of a hundred a day—that is, one man can make five doors. A panelled door is a very expensive part of an English house; and so are window-frames and staircases. If doors and windows and staircases can be made cheaper, more houses and better houses will be built; and thus more carpenters will be employed in building than if those parts of a house were made by hand. The same principle applies to machines as to tools. If carpenters had not tools to make houses, there would be few houses made; and those that were made would be as rough as the hut of the savage who has no tools. The people would go without houses, and the carpenter would go without work,—to say nothing of the people, who would also go without work, that now make tools for the carpenter.

We build in this country more of brick than of stone, because brick-earth is found almost everywhere, and stone fit for building is found only in particular districts. Bricks used to pay the state a duty of five shillings and ten pence a thousand; and yet at the kilns they were to be bought under forty shillings a thousand, which is less than a halfpenny apiece. The government wisely resolved, in 1850, to repeal the excise-duty on bricks. In 1845 the duty on glass was repealed. In 1847 the timber-duties were reduced; and in 1848 they were further reduced. The ever-present necessities of the people—the absolute want of house-accommodation for a population increasing so rapidly—rendered it a paramount duty of the government no longer to let tax interfere with the cheap building of houses. Every invention that adds to cheapness acts in the same direction; for although the direct taxes cease to press upon the various trades of building, the constant demand keeps bricks and timber at a price almost as high as before the removal or mitigation of the tax. But bricks, regarded as the production of a vast amount of labour, are intrinsically cheap. And why? Because they are made by what is truly machinery; as they were made three thousand years ago by the Egyptians.

The clay is ground in a horse-mill; the wooden mould, in which every brick is made singly, is a copying machine. One brick is exactly like another brick. Every brick is of the form of the mould in which it is made. Without the mould the workman could not make the brick of uniform dimensions; and without this uniformity the after labour of putting bricks together would be greatly increased. Without the mould the workman could not form the bricks quickly;—his own labour would be increased ten-fold. The simple machine of the mould not only gives employment to a great many brickmakers who would not be employed at all, but also to a great many bricklayers who would also want employment if the original cost of production were so enormously increased.

There is another material for building which was little used at the beginning of the century. The consumption of slate in London alone was, in 1851, from thirty thousand to forty thousand tons per annum. The quarries of Wales principally supply this immense quantity; but some slates are shipped from Lancashire and Westmorland, and from Scotland and Ireland. In the production of this one material, eight thousand quarriers are employed in Great Britain. Slates are not only used for roofing houses, but in slabs for cisterns and chimney-pieces. The great increase of the supply of water to houses by machinery led to a demand for a safer and cheaper material than lead for cisterns; and slate supplied the want.

How great a variety of things are contained in an ironmonger's shop! Half his store consists of tools of one sort or another to save labour; and the other half consists of articles of convenience or elegance most perfectly adapted to every possible want of the builder or the maker of furniture. The uncivilized man is delighted when he obtains a nail,—any nail. A carpenter and joiner, who supply the wants of a highly civilized community, are not satisfied unless they have a choice of nails, from the finest brad to the largest clasp-nail. A savage thinks a nail will hold two pieces of wood together more completely than anything else in the world. It is seldom, however, that he can afford to put it to such a use. If it is large enough, he makes it into a chisel. An English joiner knows that screws will do the work more perfectly in some cases than any nail; and therefore we have as great a variety of screws as of nails. The commonest house built in England has hinges, and locks, and bolts. A great number are finished with ornamented knobs to door-handles, with bells and bell-pulls, and a thousand other things that have grown up into necessities, because they save domestic labour, and add to domestic comfort. And many of these things really are necessities. M. Say, a French writer, gives us an example of this; and as his story is an amusing one, besides having a moral, we may as well copy it:—

"Being in the country," says he, "I had an example of one of those small losses which a family is exposed to through negligence. For the want of a latchet of small value, the wicket of a barn-yard leading to the fields was often left open. Every one who went through drew the door to: but as there was nothing to fasten the door with, it was always left flapping; sometimes open, and sometimes shut. So the cocks and hens, and the chickens, got out, and were lost. One day a fine pig got out, and ran off into the woods; and after the pig ran all the people about the place,—the gardener, and the cook, and the dairymaid. The gardener first caught sight of the runaway, and, hastening after it, sprained his ankle; in consequence of which the poor man was not able to get out of the house again for a fortnight. The cook found, when she came back from pursuing the pig, that the linen she had left by the fire had fallen down and was burning; and the dairymaid having, in her haste, neglected to tie up the legs of one of her cows, the cow had kicked a colt, which was in the same stable, and broken its leg. The gardener's lost time was worth twenty crowns, to say nothing of the pain he suffered. The linen which was burned, and the colt which was spoiled, were worth as much more. Here, then, was caused a loss of forty crowns, as well as much trouble, plague, and vexation, for the want of a latch which would not have cost three-pence." M. Say's story is one of the many examples of the truth of the old proverb—"for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the man was lost."

Nearly all the great variety of articles in an ironmonger's shop are made by machinery. Without machinery they could not be made at all, or they would be sold at a price which would prevent them being commonly used. Some of the finer articles, such as a Bramah lock, or a Chubb's lock, could not be made at all, unless machinery had been called in to produce that wonderful accuracy, through which no one of a hundred thousand locks and keys shall be exactly like another lock and key. With machinery, the manufacture of ironmongery employs large numbers of artisans who would be otherwise unemployed. There are hundreds of ingenious men at Birmingham who go into business with a capital acquired by their savings as workmen, for the purpose of manufacturing some one single article used in finishing a house, such as the knob of a lock. All the heavy work of their trade is done by machinery. The cheapness of the article creates workmen; and the savings of the workmen accumulate capital to be expended in larger works, and to employ more workmen.

The furniture of a house, some may say—the chairs, and tables, and bedsteads—is made nearly altogether by hand. True. But tools are machines; and further, we owe it to what men generally call machinery, that such furniture, even in the house of a very poor man, is more tasteful in its construction, and of finer material, than that possessed by a nobleman a hundred years ago. How is this? Machinery (that is ships) has brought us much finer woods than we grow ourselves; and other machinery (the sawing-mill) has taught us how to render that fine wood very cheap, by economising the use of it. At a veneering-mill, that is, a mill which cuts a mahogany log into thin plates, much more delicately and truly, and in infinitely less time, than they could be cut by the hand, two hundred and forty square feet of mahogany are cut by one circular saw in one hour. A veneer, or thin plate, is cut off a piece of mahogany, six feet six inches long, by twelve inches wide, in twenty-five seconds. What is the consequence of this? A mahogany table is made almost as cheap as a deal one; and thus the humblest family in England may have some article of mahogany, if it be only a tea-caddy. And let it not be said that deal furniture would afford as much happiness; for a desire for comfort, and even for some degree of elegance, gives a refinement to the character, and, in a certain degree, raises our self-respect. Diogenes, who is said to have lived in a tub, was a great philosopher; but it is not necessary to live in a tub to be wise and virtuous. Nor is that the likeliest plan for becoming so. The probability is, that a man will be more wise and virtuous in proportion as he strives to surround himself with the comforts and decent ornaments of his station.

It is a circumstance worthy to be borne in mind by all who seek the improvement of the people, that whatever raises not only the standard of comfort, but of taste, has direct effects of utility which might not at first be perceived. We will take the case of paper-hangings. Their very name shows that they were a substitute for the arras, or hangings, of former times, which were suspended from the ceilings to cover the imperfections of the walls. This was the case in the houses of the rich. The poor man in his hut had no such device, but must needs "patch a hole to keep the wind away." Till 1830, what, in the language of the excise, was called stained paper, was enormously dear, for a heavy tax greatly impeded its production. When it was dear, many walls were stencilled or daubed over with a rude pattern. The paper-hangings themselves were not only dear, but offensive to the eye, from their want of harmony in colour and of beauty in design. The old papers remained on walls for half a century; and it was not till paper-hangings became a penny a yard, or even a halfpenny, that the landlord or tenant of a small house thought of re-papering. The eye at length got offended by the dirty and ugly old paper. The walls were recovered with neat patterns. But what had offended the eye had been prejudicial to the health. The old papers, that were saturated with damp from without and bad air from within, were recipients and holders of fever. When the bed-room became neat it also became healthful. The duty on paper was 1-3/4d. per yard, when the paper-hanger used to paste together yard after yard, made by hand at the paper-mill, and stamped by block. The paper-machine which gave long rolls of paper enabled hangings to be printed by cylinder, as calico is printed. The absence of tax, and the improvement of the manufacture by machinery, have enabled every man to repaper his filthy and noxious room for almost as little as its whitewashing or colouring will cost him.

Look, again, at the carpet. Contrast it in all its varieties, from the gorgeous Persian to the neat Kidderminster, with the rushes of our forefathers, amidst which the dogs hunted for the bones that had been thrown upon the floor. The clean rushes were a rare luxury, never thought of but upon some festive occasion. The carpet manufacture was little known in England at the beginning of the last century; as we may judge from our still calling one of the most commonly-woven English carpets by the name of "Brussels." There are twelve thousand persons now employed in the manufacture of carpets in Great Britain. The Scotch carpet is the cheapest of the produce of the carpet-loom; and it may be sufficient to show the connection of machinery with the commonest as well as the finest of these productions by an engraving of the loom. One of the most beautiful inventions of man, the Jacquard apparatus (so called from the name of its inventor), is extensively used in every branch of the carpet manufacture.

Let us see what mechanical ingenuity can effect in producing the most useful and ornamental articles of domestic life from the common earth which may be had for digging. Without chemical and mechanical skill we should neither have Glass nor Pottery; and without these articles, how much lowered beneath his present station, in point of comfort and convenience, would be the humblest peasant in the land!

The cost of glass is almost wholly the wages of labour, as the materials are very abundant, and may be said to cost almost nothing; and glass is much more easily worked than any other substance.

Hard and brittle as it is, it has only to be heated, and any form that the workman pleases may be given to it. It melts; but when so hot as to be more susceptible of form than wax or clay, or anything else that we are acquainted with, it still, retains a degree of toughness and capability of extension superior to that of many solids, and of every liquid; when it has become red-hot all its brittleness is gone, and a man may do with it as he pleases. He may press it into a mould; he may take a lump of it upon the end of an iron tube, and, by blowing into the tube with his mouth (keeping the glass hot all the time), he may swell it out into a hollow ball. He may mould that ball into a bottle; he may draw it out lengthways into a pipe; he may cut it open into a cup; he may open it with shears, whirl it round with the edge in the fire, and thus make it into a circular plate. He may also roll it out into sheets, and spin it into threads as fine as a cobweb. In short, so that he keeps it hot, and away from substances by which it may be destroyed, he can do with it just as he pleases. All this, too, may be done, and is done with large quantities every day, in less time than any one would take to give an account of it. In the time that the readiest speaker and clearest describer were telling how one quart bottle is made, an ordinary set of workmen would make some dozens of bottles.

But though the materials of glass are among the cheapest of all materials, and the substance the most obedient to the hand of the workman, there is a great deal of knowledge necessary before glass can be made. It can be made profitably only at large manufactories, and those manufactories must be kept constantly at work night and day.

Glass does not exist in a natural form in many places. The sight of native crystal, probably, led men to think originally of producing a similar substance by art. The fabrication of glass is of high antiquity. The historians of China, Japan, and Tartary speak of glass manufactories existing there more than two thousand years ago. An Egyptian mummy two or three thousand years old, which was exhibited in London, was ornamented with little fragments of coloured glass. The writings of Seneca, a Roman author who lived about the time of our Saviour, and of St. Jerome, who lived five hundred years afterwards, speak of glass being used in windows. It is recorded that the Prior of the convent of Weymouth, in Dorsetshire, in the year 674, sent for French workmen to glaze the windows of his chapel. In the twelfth century the art of making glass was known in this country. Yet it is very doubtful whether glass was employed in windows, excepting those of churches and the houses of the very rich, for several centuries afterwards; and it is quite certain that the period is comparatively recent, as we have shown,[21] when glass windows were used for excluding cold and admitting light in the houses of the great body of the people, or that glass vessels were to be found amongst their ordinary conveniences. The manufacture of glass in England now employs twelve thousand people, because the article, being cheap, is of universal use. The government has wisely taken off the duty on glass; and as the article becomes still cheaper, so will the people employed in its manufacture become more numerous.

Machinery, as we commonly understand the term, is not much employed in the manufacture of glass; but chemistry, which saves as much labour as machinery, and performs work which no machinery could accomplish, is very largely employed. The materials of which glass is made are sand, or earth, and vegetable matter, such as kelp or burnt seaweed, which yield alkali. For the finest glass, sand is brought from great distances, even from Australia. These materials are put in a state of fusion by the heat of an immense furnace. It requires a red heat of sixty hours to prepare the material of a common bottle. Nearly all glass, except glass for mirrors, is what is called blown. The machinery is very simple, consisting only of an iron pipe and the lungs of the workman; and the process is perfected in all its stages by great subdivision of labour, producing extreme neatness and quickness in all persons employed in it. For instance, a wine-glass is made thus:—One man (the blower) takes up the proper quantity of glass on his pipe, and blows it to the size wanted for the bowl; then he whirls it round on a reel, and draws out the stalk. Another man (the footer) blows a smaller and thicker ball, sticks it to the end of the stalk of the blower's glass, and breaks his pipe from it. The blower opens that ball, and whirls the whole round till the foot is formed. Then a boy dips a small rod in the glass-pot, and sticks it to the very centre of the foot. The blower, still turning the glass round, takes a bit of iron, wets it in his mouth, and touches the ball at the place where he wishes the mouth of the glass to be. The glass separates, and the boy takes it to the finisher, who turns the mouth of it; and, by a peculiar swing that he gives it round his head, makes it perfectly circular, at the same time that it is so hardened as to be easily snapped from the rod. Lastly, the boy takes it on a forked iron to the annealing furnace, where it is cooled gradually.

All these operations require the greatest nicety in the workmen; and would take a long time in the performance, and not be very neatly done after all, if they were all done by one man. But the quickness with which they are done by the division of labour is perfectly wonderful.

The cheapness of glass for common use, which cheapness is produced by chemical knowledge and the division of labour, has set the ingenuity of man to work to give greater beauty to glass as an article of luxury. The employment of sharp-grinding wheels, put in motion by a treadle, and used in conjunction with a very nice hand, produces cut glass. Cut glass is now comparatively so cheap, that scarcely a family of the middle ranks is without some beautiful article of this manufacture.

But the repeal of the duty on glass, and of the tax upon windows, has had the effect of improving the architecture of our houses to a degree which no one would have thought possible who had not studied how the operation of a tax impedes production. We have now plate-glass of the largest dimensions, giving light and beauty to our shops; and sheet-glass, nearly as effective as plate, adorning our private dwellings. Sheet-glass, in the making of which an amount of ingenuity is exercised which would have been thought impossible in the early stages of glass-making, is doing for the ordinary purposes of building what plate-glass did formerly for the rich. A portion of melted glass, weighing twelve or fourteen pounds, is, by the exercise of this skill, converted into a ball, and then into a cylinder, and then into a flat plate; and thus two crystal palaces have been built, which have consumed as much glass, weight by weight, as was required for all the houses in one-fourth of the area of Great Britain in the beginning of the century.

There are two kinds of pottery—common potters' ware, and porcelain. The first is a pure kind of brick; and the second a mixture of very fine brick and glass. Almost all nations have some knowledge of pottery; and those of the very hot countries are sometimes satisfied with dishes formed by their fingers without any tool, and dried by the heat of the sun. In England pottery of every sort, and in all countries good pottery, must be baked or burnt in a kiln of some kind or other.

Vessels for holding meat and drink are almost as indispensable as the meat and drink themselves; and the two qualities in them that are most valuable are, that they shall be cheap, and easily cleaned. Pottery, as it is now produced in England, possesses both of these qualities in the very highest degree. A white basin, having all the useful properties of the most costly vessels, may be purchased for twopence at the door of any cottage in England. There are very few substances used in human food that have any effect upon these vessels; and it is only rinsing them in hot water, and wiping them with a cloth, and they are clean.

The making of an earthen bowl would be to a man who made a first attempt no easy matter. Let us see how it is done so that it can be carried two or three hundred miles and sold for twopence, leaving a profit to the maker, and the wholesale and retail dealer.

The common pottery is made of pure clay and pure flint. The flint is found only in the chalk counties, and the fine clays in Devonshire and Dorsetshire; so that, with the exception of some clay for coarse ware, the materials out of which the pottery is made have to be carried from the South of England to Staffordshire, where the potteries are situated.

The great advantage that Staffordshire possesses is abundance of coal to burn the ware and supply the engines that grind the materials.

The clay is worked in water by various machinery till it contains no single piece large enough to be visible to the eye. It is like cream in consistence. The flints are burned. They are first ground in a mill, and then worked in water in the same manner as the clay, the large pieces being returned a second time to the mill.

When both are fine enough, one part of flint is mixed with five or six of clay; the whole is worked to a paste, after which it is kneaded either by the hands or a machine; and when the kneading is completed, it is ready for the potter.

He has a little wheel which lies horizontally. He lays a portion of clay on the centre of the wheel, puts one hand, or finger if the vessel is to be a small one, in the middle, and his other hand on the outside, and, as the wheel turns rapidly round, draws up a hollow vessel in an instant. With his hands, or with very simple tools, he brings it to the shape he wishes, cuts it from the wheel with a wire, and a boy carries it off. The potter makes vessel after vessel, as fast as they can be carried away.

The potter's wheel is an instrument of the highest antiquity. In the book of Ecclesiasticus we read—"So doth the potter, sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number: he fashioneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet; he applieth himself to lead it over, and is diligent to make clean the furnace."—(c. xxxix., v. 29, 30.) At the present day the oriental potter stands in a pit, in which the lower machinery of his wheel is placed. He works as the potter of the ancient Hebrews.

As the potter produces the vessels they are partially dried; after which they are turned on a lathe and smoothed with a wet sponge when necessary. Only round vessels can be made on the wheel; those of other shapes are made in moulds of plaster. Handles and other solid parts are pressed in moulds, and stuck on while they and the vessels are still wet.

The vessels thus formed are first dried in a stove, and, when dry, burnt in a kiln. They are in this state called biscuit. If they are finished white, they are glazed by another process. If they are figured, the patterns are engraved on copper, and printed on coarse paper rubbed with soft soap. The ink is made of some colour that will stand the fire, ground with earthy matter. These patterns are moistened and applied to the porous biscuit, which absorbs the colour, and the paper is washed off, leaving the pattern on the biscuit.

The employment of machinery to do all the heavy part of the work, the division of labour, by which each workman acquires wonderful dexterity in his department, and the conducting of the whole upon a large scale, give bread to a vast number of people, make the pottery cheap, and enable it to be sold at a profit in almost every market in the world. It is not ninety years since the first pottery of a good quality was extensively made in England; and before that time what was used was imported,—the common ware from Delft, in Holland (from which it acquired its name), and the porcelain from China.

The history of the manufacture of porcelain affords us two examples of persevering ingenuity—of intense devotion to one object—which have few parallels in what some may consider the higher walks of art. Palissy and Wedgwood are names that ought to be venerated by every artisan. The one bestowed upon France her manufacture of porcelain, so long the almost exclusive admiration of the wealthy and the tasteful. The other gave to England her more extensive production of earthenware, combining with great cheapness the imitation of the most beautiful forms of ancient art. The potteries of Staffordshire may be almost said to have been created by Josiah Wedgwood. In his workshops we may trace the commencement of a system of improved design which made his ware so superior to any other that had been produced in Europe for common uses. In other branches of manufacture this system found few imitators; and we were too long contented, in our textile fabrics especially, with patterns that were unequalled for ugliness—miserable imitations of foreign goods, or combinations of form and colour outraging every principle of art. We have seen higher things attempted in the present day; but for the greater part of a century the wares of the Staffordshire potter were the only attempts to show that taste was as valuable a quality in association with the various articles which are required for domestic use, as good materials and clean workmanship. It was long before we discovered that taste had an appreciable commercial value.

We think that, with regard to buildings and the furniture of buildings, it will be admitted that machinery, in the largest sense of the word, has increased the means of every man to procure a shelter from the elements, and to give him a multitude of conveniences within that shelter. Most will agree that a greater number of persons are profitably employed in affording this shelter and these conveniences, with tools and machines, than if they possessed no such mechanical aids to their industry. In 1851 there were a hundred and eighty-two thousand carpenters and joiners; thirty-one thousand brickmakers; sixty-eight thousand bricklayers; sixty-two thousand painters, plumbers, and glaziers; eighteen thousand plasterers; a hundred thousand masons (some of whom were paviours); forty-two thousand glass and earthenware makers; besides an almost innumerable variety of subordinate trades—engaged in the production of houses, their fittings, and their utensils.

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