Knowledge is power

But let a more efficient machine for grinding corn be introduced, such as the Americans have at Pittsburgh, and the peasant might think that the working millers would be ruined. And yet the mill at Pittsburgh is making flour cheaper in England, by that competition which here forces onward improvement in mill-machinery; and by increasing the consumption of flour calls into action more superintending labour for its production. That particular American mill produces 500 barrels of flour per day, each containing 196lbs., and it employs forty managing persons. It produces cheap flour by saving labour in all its processes. It stands on the bank of a navigable river—a high building into which the corn for grinding must be removed from boats alongside. Is the grain necessary to produce these 500 barrels of flour per day, amounting to 98,000lbs., carried by man's labour to the topmost floor of that high mill? It is "raised by an elevator consisting of an endless band, to which are fixed a series of metal cans revolving in a long wooden trough, which is lowered through the respective hatchways into the boat, and is connected at its upper end with the building where its belt is driven. The lower end of the trough is open, and, as the endless band revolves, six or eight men shovel the grain into the ascending cans, which raise it so rapidly that 4000 bushels can be lifted and deposited in the mill in an hour."[16] The drudging and unskilled labourers who would have toiled in carrying up the grain are free to do some skilled labour, of which the amount required is constantly increasing; and the cost saved by the elevator goes towards the great universal fund, out of which more labour and better labour are to find the means of employment.

CHAPTER XI.

Present and former condition of the country—Progress of cultivation—Evil influence of feudalism—State of agriculture in the sixteenth century—Modern improvements—Prices of wheat—Increased breadth of land under cultivation—Average consumption of wheat—Implements of agriculture now in use—Number of agriculturists in Great Britain.

It is the remark of foreigners, as they travel from the sea-coast to London, that the country is a garden. It has taken nineteen centuries to make it such a garden. The marshes in which the legions of Julius Cæsar had to fight, up to their loins, with the Britons, to whom these swamps were habitual, are now drained. The dense woods in which the Druids worshipped are now cleared. Populous towns and cheerful villages offer themselves on every side. Wherever the eye reaches there is cultivation. Instead of a few scattered families painfully earning a subsistence by the chace, or by tilling the land without the knowledge and the instruments that science has given to the aid of manual labour,—that cultivation is carried on with a systematic routine that improves the fertility of a good season, and diminishes the evils of a bad. Instead of the country being divided amongst hostile tribes, who have little communication, the whole territory is covered with a network of roads, and canals, and navigable rivers, and railroads, through which means there is an universal market, and wherever there is demand there is instant supply. Rightly considered, there is no branch of production which has so largely benefited by the power of knowledge as that of agriculture. It was ages before the great physical changes were accomplished which we now behold on every side; and we are still in a state of progress towards the perfection of those results which an over-ruling Providence had in store for the human race, in the gradual manifestation of those discoveries which have already so changed our condition and the condition of the world.

The history of cultivation in Great Britain is full of instruction as regards the inefficiency of mere traditional practice and the slowness with which scientific improvement establishes its dominion. It is no part of our plan to follow out this history; but a few scattered facts may not be without their value.

The oppressions of tenants that were perpetrated under the feudal system, when ignorant lords of manors impeded production by every species of extortion, may be estimated by one or two circumstances. There can be no doubt that the prosperity of a tenant is the best security for the landlord's due share of the produce of the land. Without manure, in some form or other, the land cannot be fertilized: the landlords knew this, but they required to have a monopoly of the fertility. Their tenants kept a few sheep, but the landlords reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of having a sheepfold; so that the little tenants could not fold their own sheep on their own lands, but were obliged to let them be folded with those of their lord, or pay a fine.[17] The flour-mill was the exclusive property of the manorial lord, whether lay or ecclesiastical; and whatever the distance, or however bad the road, the tenant could grind nowhere but at the lord's mill. No doubt the rent of land was exceedingly low, and the lord was obliged to maintain himself and his dependents by adding something considerable to his means by many forms of legalized extortion. The rent of land was so low because the produce was inconsiderable, to an extent which will be scarcely comprehended by modern husbandmen. In the law-commentary called 'Fleta,' written about the end of the thirteenth century, the author says the farmer will be a loser unless corn be dear, if he obtains from an acre of wheat only three times the seed sown. He calculated the low produce at six bushels an acre: the average produce was perhaps little higher; we have distinct records of its being no higher a century afterwards. In 1390, at Hawsted, near Bury, the produce of the manor-farm was forty-two quarters of wheat, or three hundred and thirty-six bushels, from fifty-seven acres; and upon an average of three years sixty-one acres produced only seventy quarters, or five hundred and sixty bushels. Sir John Cullum, who collected these details from the records of his own property, says, "no particular dearness of corn followed, so that, probably, those very scanty crops were the usual and ordinary effects of the imperfect husbandry then practised." The husbandry was so imperfect that an unfavourable season for corn-crops, which in our days would have been compensated by a greater production of green crops, was followed by famine. When the ground was too hard, the seed could not be sown for want of the sufficient machine-power of plough and harrow. The chief instrument used was as weak and imperfect as the plough which we see depicted in Egyptian monuments, and which is still found in parts of Syria. The Oriental ploughman was with such an instrument obliged to bend over his plough, and load it with all the weight of his body, to prevent it merely scratching the ground instead of turning it up. His labour was great and his care incessant, as we may judge from the words of our Saviour,—"No man having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." Latimer, the Protestant martyr, in his 'Sermon of the Plough,' in which he holds that "preaching of the Gospel is one of God's plough-works, and the preacher is one of God's ploughmen," describes the labour upon which he raises his parallel: "For as the ploughman first setteth forth his plough, and then tilleth his land and breaketh it in furrows, and sometimes ridgeth it up again; and at another time harroweth it and clotteth it, and sometimes dungeth it and hedgeth it, diggeth it and weedeth it, purgeth it and maketh it clean,—so the prelate, the preacher, hath many divers offices to do." Latimer was the son of a Liecestershire farmer, and knew practically what he was talking about. He knew that the land would not bear an adequate crop without all this various and often-repeated labour. And yet the labour was so inadequately performed, that a few years after he had preached this famous sermon, we are told by a credible writer of the times of Queen Mary—William Bulleyn, a physician and botanist—that in 1555 "bread was so scant, insomuch that the plain poor people did make very much of acorns." A few years onward a great impulse was given to husbandry through various causes, amongst which the increased abundance of the precious metals through the opening of the mines of South America had no inconsiderable influence. The industrious spirit of England was fairly roused from a long sleep in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Harrison, in his 'Description of Britain,' says, "The soil is even now in these our days grown to be much more fruitful than it hath been in times past." This historian of manners saw the reason. "In times past" there was "idle and negligent occupation;" but when he wrote (1593) "our countrymen are grown to be more painful, skilful, and careful, through recompense of gain." The cultivators had their share of the benefits of cultivation; they had their "recompense of gain." Capital had been spread amongst the class of tenants: they were no longer miserable dependents upon their grasping lords. For a century or so onward the improvements in agriculture were not very decided. The rotation of crops was unknown; and winter food for sheep and cattle not being raised, the greater number were slaughtered and salted at Martinmas. The fleeces were wretchedly small, for the few sheep nibbled the stubbles and commons bare till the spring-time. The carcases of beef were not half their present size. At the beginning of the last century the turnip cultivation was introduced, and in the middle of the century the horse-hoeing husbandry came into use. Our agricultural revolution was fairly begun a hundred years ago; and yet for many years the value of manure was very imperfectly understood, and even up to our own time it has been wasted in every direction. There is given in Sir John Cullum's book an abstract of the lease of a farm in 1753. The tenant was to be allowed two shillings for every load of manure that he brought from Bury, about four miles distant. During twenty-one years the landlord was charged with only one load. At that period all agriculture was in a great degree traditional. There were no agricultural societies—no special journals for this great branch of national industry. Arthur Young applied his shrewd and observing talent to the dissemination of farming knowledge; but the agricultural mind, with very few exceptions, rejected book-knowledge as vain and impertinent. Chemistry applied to the soil was as unknown to the cultivator as the perturbations of the planets. Geology was an affair of conjecture, and had assumed no form of utility. Meteorology entered into no farmer's mode of estimating the comparative value of one site and another. Sir John Cullum made a most curious and instructive estimate of the science of the Suffolk farmers in 1784, when he wrote,—"The farm-houses are in general well furnished with every convenient accommodation. Into many of them a barometer has of late years been introduced—a most useful instrument for the husbandman, and which is mentioned here as a striking instance of the intelligence of this period."

The wars of the French Revolution, and the high prices consequent upon the almost utter absence of foreign supplies, gave a stimulus to agriculture, which principally displayed itself in the effort to bring waste lands into cultivation. From 1790 to 1819, a period of thirty years, there were two thousand one hundred and sixty-nine Inclosure Bills passed by Parliament. In the first ten years of this period the average price of wheat had increased ten shillings above the average of the ten years from 1780 to 1789. In the second ten years it had increased thirty-six shillings above that average. In the third ten years it was very nearly double, being 88s. 8d. from 1810 to 1819, and 45s. 9d. from 1780 to 1789. A portion of these prices, however, must be attributed to a depreciated currency. During that period of thirty years, very few of the great scientific improvements which have cheapened production had been introduced, although better modes of cultivation unquestionably prevailed. During the twenty years from 1820 to 1839 there were only three hundred and thirty-one Inclosure Bills passed; and the price of wheat had fallen to about the average of the ten years from 1790 to 1799, and it continued at that average for another ten years. In the ten years from 1840 to 1849, we cannot gather the amount of land brought into new cultivation from the number of Inclosure Bills, as there was a General Inclosure Act passed in 1835, to prevent the expense of particular bills for small tracts of land. But it has been calculated that, while more than three million acres were brought into cultivation in the twenty years from 1800 to 1819, about one million acres only were inclosed in the thirty years from 1820 to 1849.[18] If we look then, as we shall briefly do, at the wonderfully increased production of Great Britain, we shall be naturally led to the conclusion that some cause, much more efficient than the inclosure of waste lands, has given us the means of feeding a population which has doubled since the beginning of the century. This production is the result of the whole course of improvement effected by science, and stimulated by capital. The Bedford Level was drained by our ancestors. The fens of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire have been drained effectually in our time. That luxuriant flat now rejoices in waving corn-crops over many a mile. A few years ago it was a land of stagnant ditches; where little wind-mills, that looked to the solitary traveller through that cold district like the toys of children, lifted the water out of the trenches, and left an isolated acre or two of dry earth for man to toil in. Now mighty steam-pumps carry the water into artificial rivers, and the whole region is unrivalled for fertility.

It is estimated by some statists that the average consumption of wheat for each individual of the population is eight bushels. Others estimate that consumption at six bushels. It will be sufficient for a broad view of the increase of production, as compared with the increase of population, to take the consumption at eight bushels, or a quarter of wheat per head. In the ten years from 1801 to 1810, deducting an annual average of 600,000 quarters of foreign wheat and flour imported, the population in 1811 being 11,769,725, the number fed by wheat of home growth was somewhat above eleven millions. In the ten years from 1841 to 1850, deducting an annual average of 3,000,000 quarters of foreign wheat and flour, the population in 1851 being 21,121,967, the number fed by wheat of home growth was somewhat above eighteen millions. The productive power of the country had increased, in the course of fifty years, to the enormous extent of giving subsistence, in one article of agricultural produce alone, to seven millions of people. The population in 1751 was estimated at little more than seven millions. It has trebled in a century; and we may be perfectly sure that the production of the land has far more than trebled in that period. The probability is that it has quadrupled; for there is no doubt that the great bulk of the people are better fed than in 1751, when rye-bread was the common sustenance of the great body of labourers throughout the country.

Let us endeavour to take a rapid view of the implements of agriculture in common use at the present time—implements which have been described as "intended not to bring about new conditions of soil, nor to yield new products of any kind, but to do with more certainty and cheapness what had been done hitherto by employing the rude implements of former centuries." Such are the words of Mr. Pusey's admirable Report on the Agricultural Implements in the 'Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations.' We cannot do better than furnish a few slight notices of the leading subjects of this report.

The plough and the harrow were the sole instruments of tillage at the beginning of this century. Bloomfield, in his 'Farmer's Boy,' describes them:—

The old plough used to be drawn with four horses; and they were needed. It was a cumbrous instrument, "adapted to the clay soils when those soils were the chief source of corn to the country, and had been handed down from father to son, after the heavy lands had been widely laid down to grazing-ground, and the former downs had become our principal arable land." The modern plough is an implement constructed on mathematical principles, which, by its mould-board, "raising each slice of earth (furrow-slice) from its flat position, through an upright one, lays it over half inclined on the preceding slice." The perfect instrument produces the skilled labourer. A good ploughman will set up a pole a quarter of a mile distant, and trace a furrow so true up to that goal that no eye can detect any divergence from absolute straightness. Mr. Pusey justly says that this is a triumph of art.

With an agriculture that permits no waste, much of the picturesque has fled from our fields. Bloomfield describes the repose of the ploughman after he has driven his team to the boundary of his furrow:—

Gone is the green headland; gone the cowslip bank; gone the pendent boughs. The furrow runs up to the extremest point of a vast field without hedges. Gone, too, are the green slips between the lands of common fields. Their very names of "balk" and "feather" are obsolete. These adornments of the landscape are inconsistent with the demands of a population that doubles itself in half a century. The labourer has small rest, and the soil has less. Under the old husbandry, before the culture of the green crops, one-third of the arable land was always idle. Two years of grain-crop, and one year of fallow, was the invariable rule. Look how the land is worked now. The plough and the harrow turn up and pulverize the soil, but they do it much more effectually than of old. The roller is a noble iron instrument, instead of an old pollard. Modern ingenuity has added the clod-crusher. But something was still wanting for the better preparation of land for seed—this is the scarifier or cultivator; which, according to Mr. Pusey, will save one half of the horse-labour employed upon the plough. Into the details of this saving it is no part of our purpose to enter.[19] We give a cut of the implement, covering as much ground in width as 8-1/2 ploughs.

We are told that "lambs fed with a turnip-cutter would be worth more at the end of a winter by eight shillings a head than lambs fed on whole turnips." The chaff-cutter is an instrument equally valuable.

The last machine which we shall mention is connected with the greatest of all improvements in the crop-producing power of British land—the system of tile-draining. Pipes are now made by machinery; and land may be effectually drained at a cost of 4l. per acre.

CHAPTER XII.

Production of a knife—Manufacture of iron—Raising coal—The hot-blast—Iron bridges—Rolling bar-iron—Making steel—Sheffield manufactures—Mining in Great Britain—Numbers engaged in mines and metal manufactures.

We have been speaking somewhat fully of agricultural instruments and agricultural labour, because they are at the root of all other profitable industry. Bread and beef make the bone and sinew of the workman. Ploughs and harrows and drills and thrashing-machines are combinations of wood and iron. Rude nations have wooden ploughs. Unless the English labourer made a plough out of two pieces of stick, and carried it upon his shoulder to the field, as the toil-worn and poor people of India do, he must have some iron about it. He cannot get iron without machinery. He cannot get even his knife, his tool of all-work, without machinery. From the first step to the last in the production of a knife, machinery and scientific appliances have done the chief work. People that have no science and no machinery sharpen a stone, or bit of shell or bone, and cut or saw with it in the best way they can; and after they have become very clever, they fasten it to a wooden handle with a cord of bark. An Englishman examines two or three dozens of knives, selects which he thinks the best, and pays a shilling for it, the seller thanking him for his custom. The man who has nothing but the bone or the shell would gladly toil a month for that which does not cost an English labourer half a day's wages.

And how does the Englishman obtain his knife upon such easy terms? From the very same cause that he obtains all his other accommodations cheaper, in comparison with the ordinary wages of labour, than the inhabitant of most other countries—that is, from the operations of science, either in the making of the thing itself, or in procuring that without which it could not be made. We must always remember that, if we could not get the materials without scientific application, it would be impossible for us to get what is made of those materials—even if we had the power of fashioning those materials by the rudest labour.

Keeping this in mind, let us see how a knife could be obtained by a man who had nothing to depend upon but his hands.

Ready-made, without the labour of some other man, a knife does not exist; but the iron, of which the knife is made, is to be had. Very little iron has ever been found in a native state, or fit for the blacksmith. The little that has been found in that state has been found only very lately; and if human art had not been able to procure any in addition to that, gold would have been cheap as compared with iron.

Iron is, no doubt, very abundant in nature; but it is always mixed with some other substance that not only renders it unfit for use, but hides its qualities. It is found in the state of what is called iron-stone, or iron-ore. Sometimes it is mixed with clay, at other times with lime or with the earth of flint; and there are also cases in which it is mixed with sulphur. In short, in the state in which iron is frequently met with, it is a much more likely substance to be chosen for paving a road, or building a wall, than for making a knife.

But suppose that the man knows the particular ore or stone that contains the iron, how is he to get it out? Mere force will not do, for the iron and the clay, or other substance, are so nicely mixed, that, though the ore were ground to the finest powder, the grinder is no nearer the iron than when he had a lump of a ton weight.

A man who has a block of wood has a wooden bowl in the heart of it; and he can get it out too by labour. The knife will do it for him in time; and if he take it to the turner, the turner with his machinery, his lathe, and his gouge, will work it out for him in half an hour. The man who has a lump of iron-ore has just as certainly a knife in the heart of it; but no mere labour can work it out. Shape it as he may, it is not a knife, or steel, or even iron—it is iron-ore; and dress it as he will, it would not cut better than a brickbat—certainly not so well as the shell or bone of the savage.

There must be knowledge before anything can be done in this case. We must know what is mixed with the iron, and how to separate it. We cannot do it by mere labour, as we can chip away the wood and get out the bowl; and therefore we have recourse to fire.

In the ordinary mode of using it, fire would make matters worse. If we put the material into the fire as a stone, we should probably receive it back as slag or dross. We must, therefore, prepare our fuel. Our fire must be hot, very hot; but if our fuel be wood we must burn it into charcoal, or if it be coal into coke.

The charcoal, or coke, answers for one purpose; but we have still the clay or other earth mixed with our iron, and how are we to get rid of that? Pure clay, or pure lime, or pure earth of flint, remains stubborn in our hottest fires; but when they are mixed in a proper proportion, the one melts the other.

So charcoal or coke, and iron-stone or iron-ore, and limestone, are put into a furnace; the charcoal or coke is lighted at the bottom, and wind is blown into the furnace, at the bottom also. If that wind is not sent in by machinery, and very powerful machinery too, the effect will be little, and the work of the man great; but still it can be done.

In this furnace the lime and clay, or earth of flint, unite, and form a sort of glass, which floats upon the surface. At the same time the carbon, or pure charcoal, of the fuel, with the assistance of the limestone, mixes with the stone, or ore, and melts the iron, which, being heavier than the other matters, runs down to the bottom of the furnace, and remains there till the workman lets it out by a hole made at the bottom of the furnace for that purpose, and plugged with sand. When the workman knows there is enough melted, or when the appointed time arrives, he displaces the plug of sand with an iron rod, and the melted iron runs out like water, and is conveyed into furrows made in sand, where it cools, and the pieces formed in the principal furrows are called "sows," and those in the furrows branching from them "pigs."

We are now advanced a considerable way towards the production of a knife. We have the materials of a knife. We have the iron extracted out of the iron-ore. Before we trace the progress of a knife to its final polish, let us see what stupendous efforts of machinery have been required to produce the cast iron.

In every part of the operation of making iron—in smelting the iron out of the ore; in moulding cast iron into those articles for which it is best adapted; in working malleable iron, and in applying it to use after it is made; nothing can be done without fire, and the fuel that is used in almost every stage of the business is coal. The coal trade and the iron trade are thus so intimately connected, so very much dependent upon each other, that neither of them could be carried on to any extent without the other. The coal-mines supply fuel, and the iron-works give mining tools, pumps, railroads, wheels, and steam-engines, in return. A little coal might be got without the iron engines, and a little iron might be made without coals, by the charcoal of wood. But the quantity of both would be trifling in comparison. The wonderful amount of the production of iron in Great Britain, and the cheapness of iron, as compared with the extent of capital required for its manufacture, arises from the fact that the coal-beds and the beds of iron-ore lie in juxta-position. The iron-stones alternate with the beds of coal in almost all our coal-fields; and thus the same mining undertakings furnish the ore out of which iron is made and the fuel by which it is smelted. If the coal were in the north, and the fuel in the south, the carriage of the one to the other would double the cost.

There was a time when iron was made in this country with very little machinery. Iron was manufactured here in the time of the Romans; but it was made with great manual labour, and was consequently very dear. Hutton, in his 'History of Birmingham,' tells us that there is a large heap of cinders near that town which have been produced by an ancient iron-furnace; and that from the quantity of cinders, as compared with the mechanical powers possessed by our forefathers, the furnace must have been constantly at work from the time of Julius Cæsar. A furnace with a steam blast would produce as large a heap in a few years.

At present a cottager in the south of England, where there is no coal in the earth, may have a bushel of good coals delivered at the door of his cottage for eighteen pence; although that is far more than the price of coal at the pit's mouth. If he had even the means of transporting himself and his family to the coal district, he could not, without machinery, get a bushel of coals at the price of a year's work. Let us see how a resolute man would proceed in such an undertaking.

The machinery, we will say, is gone. The mines are filled up, which the greater part of them would be, with water, if the machinery were to stop a single week. Let us suppose that the adventurous labourer knows exactly the spot where the coal is to be found. This knowledge, in a country that has never been searched for coals before, is no easy matter, even to those who understand the subject best: it is the province of geology to give that knowledge. But we shall suppose that he gets over that difficulty too, for after it there is plenty of difficulty before him.

Well, he comes to the exact spot that he seeks, and places himself right over the seam of coal. That seam is only a hundred fathoms below the surface, which depth he will, of course, reach in good time. To work he goes; pares off the green sod with his shovel, loosens the earth with his pickaxe, and, in the course of a week, is twenty feet down into the loose earth and gravel, and clears the rock at the bottom. He rests during the Sunday, and comes refreshed to his work on Monday morning; when, behold, there are twelve feet of water in his pit.

Suppose he now calls in the aid of a bucket and rope, and that he bales away, till, as night closes, he has lowered the water three feet. Next morning it is up a foot and a half: but no matter; he has done something, and next day he redoubles his efforts, and brings the water down to only four feet. That is encouraging; but, from the depth, he now works his bucket with more difficulty, and it is again a week before his pit is dry. The weather changes; the rain comes down heavily; the surface on which it falls is spongy; the rock which he has reached is water-tight; and in twelve hours his pit is filled to the brim. It is in vain to go on.

The sinking of a pit, even to a less depth than a hundred fathoms, sometimes demands, notwithstanding all the improvements by machinery, a sum of not less than a hundred pounds a fathom, or ten thousand pounds for the whole pit; and therefore, supposing it possible for a single man to do it at the rate of eighteen pence a day, the time which he would require would be between four hundred and five hundred years.

Whence comes it that the labour of between four hundred and five hundred years is reduced to a single day? and that which, independently of the carriage, would have cost ten thousand pounds, is got for eighteen pence? It is because man joins with man, and machinery is employed to do the drudgery. Nations that have no machinery have no coal fires, and are ignorant that there is hidden under the earth a substance which contributes more, perhaps, to the health and comfort of the inhabitants of Britain than any other commodity which they enjoy.

No nations have worked coal to anything approaching the extent in which it has been worked by our countrymen. It has been calculated that France, Belgium, Spain, Prussia, Bohemia, and the United States of America, do not annually produce more than seventeen million tons of coal, which is about half of our annual produce.[20]