of the India-rubber variety employ 3212 horse-power or 15,000 steam Crispins, over and above their Christian fellows who stick solitary to the last, and who, it must be owned, produce an article more of the Revolutionary type and more solid and durable.  As a cord-wainer Steam is a failure; but he works cheaply, and will continue to hammer on, and disseminate his commodity of brown paper throughout the temperate zone.  Three-fourths of the population of the globe still runs unshod, however, and it is obvious that this crying want cannot be met by the old system.  Steam will perforce keep pegging away till Cathay, Xipangu, India and all the isles awaken to the absurdity of walking on cotton or undressed human skin.  Could one of our 299 fire-fed cobblers have been set to work at Valley Forge, backed by one of the 1057 makers of woolen that are similarly nourished!

But we do Mr. Watt’s lusty bantling injustice in assigning him exclusively the tastes of a cit.  He is not insensible to pastoral charms, and often selects a home among the hemlocks and under the broad-armed oaks, by bosky glen or open mead, wherever the brooklet brawls or dreams, for he sticks to the waterside like a beaver.  Here he sits down, like an artist as he is, until he has got all the choice bits of the grove.  The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts.  ’There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating our forests.  An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc.  Armed with the handsaw, all the Revolutionary patriots and Tories together, withdrawing their attention entirely from military affairs, as well as from all other mundane concerns, would not have turned out one-sixth of the quantity of lumber demanded by their descendants of a period that boasts itself the age of iron, and has as little as possible to do with wood.  And if we place in the hands of the patriarchs the ancestral axes, and tell them to get out charcoal for three millions of tons of iron, to be hauled an average of a hundred miles to market by oxen over roads whose highest type was the corduroy, the imagination reels at the helplessness of the heroes.

[Illustration:  Grain elevator.]

The paternal thoughtfulness of the home government employed itself in relieving the colonist from such exhausting drafts upon his energies.  It sedulously prohibited his throwing himself away on the manufacture of iron or anything else.  In 1750 it placed him under a penalty of L200 for erecting a rolling-mill, tilt-hammer or steel-furnace.  Lest the governor of the colony should fail to enforce this statute and protect the pioneer from such a waste of time, it held that functionary to a personal forfeit of L500 for failing, within thirty days after presentment