While it was yet ticking, the train stopped at West Newton, and we stepped out upon the platform.  The station nearest to the Watch-Factory is that at Waltham upon the Fitchburg Railroad; but by taking the Worcester cars to West Newton, you secure a pleasant drive of a mile or two across the country.  If you can also secure, as my watch took care to do for me, the company of the resident manager of the factory, the drive is entirely pleasant and the talk full of value.

We import about five millions of dollars’ worth of watches every year, mainly from England and Switzerland through France, and then pay about as much more to get them to go.  Of course inquisitive Yankee ingenuity long ago asked the question, Why should we do it?  If anything is to be made, why should not we make it better than anybody in the world?  The answer was very evident,—­because we could not compete with the skilled and poorly paid labor of Europe.  But during the last war with England the question became as emphatic as it is now, and a practical answer was given in the excellent watches made at Worcester in Massachusetts, and at Hartford in Connecticut.

But these were merely prophetic protests.  The best watches in use were Swiss.  Four-fifths of the work in making them was done by hand in separate workshops, subject of course to the skill, temper, and conscience of the workmen.  The various parts of each were then sent in to the finisher.  Every watch was thus a separate and individual work.  There could be no absolute precision in the parts of different watches even of the same general model; and only the best works of the best finishers were the best watches.  The purchase of a watch became almost as uncertain as that of a horse, and many of the dealers might be called watch-jockeys as justly as horse-dealers horse-jockeys.

A.L.  Dennison, of Maine, seems to have been the first who conceived American watch-making as a manufacture that could hold its own against European competition.  It was clear enough that to put raw and well-paid American labor into the field against European skill and low wages, with no other protection than four per cent., which was then the tariff, was folly.  But why not apply the same principle to making watches that Eli Whitney applied to making fire-arms, and put machinery to do the work of men, thereby saving wages and securing uniform excellence of work?  There was no reason whatever, provided you could make the machinery.  Mr. Dennison supplied the idea; who would supply the means of working it out?  He was an enthusiast, of course,—­visionary, probably; for in all inventors the imagination must be so powerful that it will sometimes disturb the conditions essential to the practical experiment; but he interested others until the necessary tools began to appear, and enough capital being willing to try the chances, the experiment of making American watches by machinery began in Roxbury in the year 1850.  After various fortunes, the manufacture passed from the original hands into those of the present company, which is incorporated by the State of Massachusetts.