After the textile fabrics, by far the most important products of English industry are the metal-wares.  This trade has its headquarters at Birmingham, where the finer metal goods of all sorts are produced, at Sheffield for cutlery, and in Staffordshire, especially at Wolverhampton, where the coarser articles, locks, nails, etc., are manufactured.  In describing the position of the workers employed in these trades, let us begin with Birmingham.  The disposition of the work has retained in Birmingham, as in most places where metals are wrought, something of the old handicraft character; the small employers are still to be found, who work with their apprentices in the shop at home, or when they need steam-power, in great factory buildings which are divided into little shops, each rented to a small employer, and supplied with a shaft moved by the engine, and furnishing motive power for the machinery.  Leon Faucher, author of a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which at least betray study, and are better than what has hitherto been written upon the subject by Englishmen or Germans, characterises this relation in contrast with the manufacture of Lancashire as “Democratie industrielle,” and observes that it produces no very favourable results for master or men.  This observation is perfectly correct, for the many small employers cannot well subsist on the profit divided amongst them, determined by competition, a profit under other circumstances absorbed by a single manufacturer.  The centralising tendency of capital holds them down.  For one who grows rich ten are ruined, and a hundred placed at a greater disadvantage than ever, by the pressure of the one upstart who can afford to sell more cheaply than they.  And in the cases where they have to compete from the beginning against great capitalists, it is self-evident that they can only toil along with the greatest difficulty.  The apprentices are, as we shall see, quite as badly off under the small employers as under the manufacturers, with the single difference that they, in turn, may become small employers, and so attain a certain independence—­that is to say, they are at best less directly exploited by the bourgeoisie than under the factory system.  Thus these small employers are neither genuine proletarians, since they live in part upon the work of their apprentices, nor genuine bourgeois, since their principal means of support is their own work.  This peculiar midway position of the Birmingham iron-workers is to blame for their having so rarely joined wholly and unreservedly in the English labour movements.  Birmingham is a politically radical, but not a Chartist, town.  There are, however, numerous larger factories belonging to capitalists; and in these the factory system reigns supreme.  The division of labour, which is here carried out to the last detail (in the needle industry, for example), and the use of steam-power, admit of the employment of a great multitude of women and children,