As a general rule in travelling, we pass by all hotels with porticoes to take refuge in more modest Green Dragons or Blue Boars.

Walsall has a municipal corporation of six aldermen and eighteen councillors.  The Reform Bill, to increase the troubles of this innocent borough, placed it in schedule B, and gave it the privilege of making one M.P.

Fierce contests at every general election have been the result, in which some blood, much money, and more beer, have been expended.  But neither party has thought it worth while to make the education of the savages of the Black Country a piece of politics, and, if any one did, he would only be torn to pieces between Church and Dissenters.

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Dudley in Worcestershire, about six miles from Walsall by the South Staffordshire Railway, has a castle and more than one legend for the antiquarian, a cave, and limestone pits full of fossils for the geologist, and especial interest for the historical economist, being the centre of the district where the first successful attempts were made to smelt iron by coal,—­a process which has contributed, almost as much as our success in textile manufactures, to give this small island a wealth and power which a merely agricultural non-exporting community could never have attained.

Iron was manufactured with charcoal in England from the time of the Romans till the middle of the eighteenth century, when the timber of many counties had been entirely exhausted by the process.  In 1558, in the reign of Elizabeth, it was enacted that “no timber of the breadth of one foot square at the stub, and growing within fourteen miles of the sea, or any part of the river Thames or Severn, or any other river, creek, or stream, by the which carriage is commonly used by boat or other vessel, to any part of the sea, shall be converted to coal, or fuel for making iron;” {125a} and, in 1581, a further Act was passed to prevent the destruction of timber.  “For remedy whereof it was enacted that no new iron works should be erected within twenty-two miles of London nor within fourteen miles of the river Thames, nor in the several parts of Sussex near the sea therein named.  This Act not to extend to the woods of Christopher Durrell, in the parish of Newdigate, within the weald of Surrey, which woods have been coppiced by him for the use of his iron works in those parts.”

At the same period, we find from a letter in the Stradling Correspondence, {125b} that, while iron was made in Surrey, Sussex, and Kent, where not a pound is now manufactured, in Glamorganshire, at present a great seat of iron manufacture, iron was so scarce that an anvil was leased out at the rent of 3s. 4d. a year, {126} a rent at which, taking the then value of money, a very tolerable anvil could now be purchased.