engineer, made many additional improvements, and sank in the enterprise some sixty thousand pounds sterling, for which their only reward was blighted hopes and embittered lives.  In 1847 the London Times made a fruitless appeal on behalf of the surviving brother, who was eighty years of age and in great poverty.  It is seldom that the world voluntarily makes return to those who have bestowed upon it great material or moral benefits, though it is ever ready to expend its treasure for engines of destruction and to magnify and reward those who have been most successful in destroying human life.

The first “machine” mill was started at Frogmore, Hertz, England, in 1803, which was the year of the great Louisiana Purchase by the United States, and it is not difficult to say which event has been productive of the greater and more beneficial results to this nation.  Through this invention and its improvements, the modern newspaper and magazine, with their tens and hundreds of thousands of copies daily, have been made possible, and men of all classes have been brought in touch with the best thought of the day.  Whatever makes for greater intelligence and enlightenment throughout a nation makes for the greater stability of the national life, and gives new emphasis to Bulwer’s words: 

    Take away the sword; States can be saved without it—­bring the pen.

If to-day the power of the pen over the sword is greater than it has ever been before, its increased and increasing influence must be credited in large measure to the inventive genius and the public-spirited enterprise that has made possible the great output of our modern paper-mills.  So thoroughly did these forces do their work in the beginning that in the century that has elapsed since the Fourdrinier brothers sacrificed themselves and their means in the perfecting of their machine, there have been really no changes in the fundamental principle.  Those that have been made have been in the nature of further development and improvement, such as increasing the speed and widening the web, thereby multiplying the product many fold.

But let us resume the interesting journey of the rags, which had reached a state of purification and perfection as pulp, and which we left in the beaters.  In some grades of paper the perfected and prepared pulp is taken from the beaters and passed through what is known as a “refining” or “Jordan” engine for the purpose of more thoroughly separating the fibers and reducing them to extreme fineness.  The refining engines are, however, used only in the manufacture of certain grades of paper.  The pulp is next taken from the beater or refining engine, as the case may be, to what is called a “stuff-chest,” an inclosed vat partly filled with water, in which a contrivance for shaking and shifting, properly called an “agitator,” keeps the fibers in suspension.