That is a feature the citizens point out with a good deal of honest pride—­the prosperity of the old families, enabling them at once to invest in the most enormous of modern mechanical applications.  The wealthy companies now found here did not go to work by calling for capital from the large cities:  they went to the old stocking, and found it there.  The manufacturers show you, reared in a back office or sticking on a wall, the ancient family sign, which Washington and La Fayette regarded at the time of their disasters along the Brandywine.  It is one continuity of thrift.

Take, for instance, some of these Lairds of America, who build ships along the Delaware as their prototypes upon the Clyde.  The Harlan & Hollingsworth Company claims to be the oldest iron shipbuilding establishment in America.  The money in this concern was local.  The partners were old neighbors, relatives or friends.  They worked along as a firm until 1868, when the huge proportions of their business induced them to incorporate themselves as a company, still distinguished by the good old proper names.  We stroll into their domain by the river-side, and if we previously cherished any notion that shipbuilding was a decayed institution in America, the lively tumult here will effectually drive the insulting thought out of our heads.  Among a shoal of leviathans stretched out beside the waters there is the iron steamer Acapulco, waiting for her compound engines from John Elder & Co. of Glasgow:  she is three hundred feet long (and that is a dimension that looks almost immeasurable when dry on land), forty feet beam and twenty-five hundred tons burden.  Another, of similar dimensions, is building beside her, and they are both intended for the Pacific Mail Company’s line, and will ply between California and China.  The various operations going on upon the ground—­the laying of an iron keel three hundred feet long, the modeling into true and fine curves the enormous plates for a ship’s side, the joining of these so neatly that the rivets are not visible, and the bending of stout iron timbers on vast iron floors—­are interesting even as a mere spectacle; and the trains of men who go about to minister to the various great machines seem like races of beings suddenly diminished in the scale of magnitude, and to be so many wise Lilliputians attending around the bodies of creatures of Brobdingnag.  It is true that neat mechanical contrivances save their muscle wherever it is possible.  A great plate of iron or a bundle of deck flooring is picked up, by a hand which swings down from aloft, like a visiting-card by a lady:  a single man turning a windlass, it sails into the air, gets up as high as it chooses to, and drops delicately just where it is wanted along the length of the structure.  Out on the wharf a double “hoister,” working by steam, and able to pick up and swing a hundred tons, is used in handling the materials of the works.  The dry-docks are, in winter, a singular spectacle.