“For the dry-grinders they might all supply fans and boxes.  Some do, and the good effect is very remarkable.  Moreover the present fans and boxes could be much improved.

“One trade—­the steel-fork grinders—­is considerably worse than the rest; and although the fan does much for it, I’m told it must still remain an unhealthy trade.  If so, and Dr. Amboyne is right about Life, Labor, and Capital, let the masters co-operate with the Legislature, and extinguish the handicraft.

“For the file-cutters, the masters might—­

1st.  Try a substitute for lead.  It is all very well to say a file must rest on lead to be cut.  Who has ever employed brains on that question?  Who has tried iron, wood, and gutta-percha in layers?  Who has ever tried any thing, least of all the thing called Thought?

“2d.  If lead is the only bed—­which I doubt, and the lead must be bare—­which I dispute, then the master ought to supply every gang of file-cutters with hooks—­taps, and basins and soap, in some place adjoining their work-rooms.  Lead is a subtle, but not a swift, poison; and soap and water every two hours is an antidote.

“3d.  They ought to forbid the introduction of food into file-cutting rooms.  Workmen are a reckless set, and a dirty set; food has no business in any place of theirs, where poison is going.

“B.  What the workmen might do.

“1st.  Demand from the masters these improvements I have suggested, and, if the demand came through the secretaries of their Unions, the masters would comply.

“2d.  They might drink less and wash their bodies with a small part of the money so saved:  the price of a gill of gin and a hot bath are exactly the same; only the bath is health to a dry-grinder, or tile-cutter; the gin is worse poison to him than to healthy men.

“3d.  The small wet-grinders, who have to buy their grindstones, might buy sound ones, instead of making bargains at the quarry, which prove double bad bargains when the stone breaks, since then a new stone is required, and sometimes a new man, too.

“4th.  They might be more careful not to leave the grindstone in water.  I have traced three broken stones in one wheel to that abominable piece of carelessness.

“5th.  They ought never to fix an undersized pulley wheel.  Simmons killed himself by that, and by grudging the few hours of labor required to hang and race a sound stone.

“6th.  If files can only be cut on lead, the file-cutters might anoint the lead over night with a hard-drying ointment, soluble in turps, and this ointment might even be medicated with an antidote to the salt of lead.