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Light steel toys.—­These include chatelains, watch chains, keys, seals, purses, slides, beads, waist buckles, dress swords, steel buttons for court dresses, bodkins, spectacle frames, knitting and netting implements, and steel snuffers.  Shoe and knee buckles, which were once universally worn, alone employed five thousand persons in their manufacture, when it was the staple trade of the town.  The expense and inconvenience of shoe buckles sent them out of fashion.  Dragoons hung in the stirrup, and cricketers tore the nails of their fingers in picking up cricket balls, from the inconvenient buckle.

The trade is extremely fluctuating, and depends very much on inventive taste in which we are manifestly inferior to the French.  Some articles we can make better than they can, but they are always bringing out something new and pretty.  In small beads they undersell us enormously, while in beads of 1/6th of an inch in diameter, and upwards, we can undersell them.

A visit to a manufactory of light steel toys will afford a great deal of amusement and instruction.

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Medalling.—­Die sinking.—­Here again are trades by which Birmingham keeps up its communication with all the civilised, and part of the uncivilised world.  The first great improvements in coining the current money of the realm originated at Soho, near Birmingham, at the manufactories of two men whose memory Englishmen can never hold in sufficient respect—­Matthew Boulton and James Watt.  They were the inventors of the machinery now in use in the Royal Mint; for a long period they coined the copper money, as also some silver money for the United Kingdom, as well as money of all denominations for many foreign countries, tokens, and medals innumerable.  They made coins for the French Convention.

During the war, when money was scarce and small notes were in circulation, many tradesmen, and several public establishments issued “tokens,” which were, in fact, metal promissory notes, as they were seldom of the intrinsic value stamped on them.  By this expedient retailers advertised themselves, and temporarily increased their capital.  Some successful speculators made fortunes, others were ruined by the presentation of all their metal notes of hand at periods of panic.

At any rate, the manufacture of these articles had a great deal to do with the education of workmen for the medal manufacture which is now so extensively carried on.

The dies from which coins and medals are struck, are, of course, all executed by hand, and the excellence of each coin or medal depends on the skill of each individual workman; therefore there has been no great improvement in execution—­indeed, some medals and coins struck two thousand years ago, rival, if they do not excel, the best works of the present day.  The improvements of modern mechanical science are all in the die presses, and in producing cheap metal.  These improvements have enabled Birmingham to establish a large trade in cheap medals, which are issued in tens of thousands on every occasion that excites the public mind.  Jenny Lind and Father Mathew were both excellent customers of the medallists in their day.