reporters were topics of conversation in the House |
of Commons, one member is said to have thus pro-
ceeded, with many of those hesitations and stum-
blings with which all around are perfectly familiar:
"You know, sir, how I address you and this
honourable house; and yet I never read the reports
of my speeches without finding them all I could
desire. I am sure I should be extremely ungrate-
ful if I threw any obstacle in the way of gentlemen
to whom I am indebted for all my fame!" There
can be no doubt that a large number of our
representatives have incurred similar obligations,
though they have not been often so candidly
acknowledged. The writer well remembers a new
member delivering what is called "a crack speech,"
and his charging"The Times" with an incorrect and
garbled report, which he proposed to substantiate
by a comparison of it with those contained in
certain other papers. The reply of the reporter of
"The Times" was to the following effect: "The
difference alleged is easily explained: Mr.
sent copies of his intended speech to the papers he
mentions; we reported it as it was actually de-
livered!" Indeed, at one period an effort was made
by a daily paper to give verbatim reports, but
actions were threatened for gross misrepresenta-
tion; and when some members actually engaged
reporters for their own speeches, the result speedily
led them to relinquish the plan. It would doubt
less have been otherwise, had the course marked
out by one member not long since, in his maiden
speech, been strictly adhered to: Sir, in conclud-
ing my first address, I beg to observe, that I
shall sometimes offer my opinions to you and this
house, but I will give you two promises: I will
not rise to speak unless I have something to say,
and I will always leave off when I have done."

In 1833, Mr. O'Connell' grave some offence to the reporters, and they resolved on the suppression of his speeches. As soon as this was discovered, Mr. O'Connell, rising in his place, said, "Sir, I see strangers!" Strangers, withdraw!" was the immediate charge of the Speaker; and the deliberation of the house was continued with closed doors. But there was no animation in the discussion of that evening-no rhetorical declamation, no eloquently enforced argument-no s cintillation of wit; and members who would "only trespass for a few minutes on the attention of the honse," faithfully adhered to their word! Thin indeed was the house itself; the lobby was almost as empty as the gallery; and glad enough were those who were compelled to stay for a time, to flee from its precincts. Mr. O'Connell, however, had taken his revenge; and the reporters, fearing a return of his retaliation, rescinded their resolution, and gave his speeches to the world.

Mr. Horace Twiss, who had sat in parliament and been a member of Mr. Canning's administration, and who has since been known as the biographer of Lord Eldon, furnished, during many of the latter years of his life, the summary of the debate in the House of Commons, as it daily appeared during the session, in "The Times." With great skill he condensed the speeches as they were delivered; and might be observed by the visitors of the gallery, writing the pith of them, with a black-lead pencil in full, and occasionally making an erasure with a small piece of india-rubber, tied to one of his button

holes. It was the pencil reports thus prepared that he despatched to the office, and those who wanted only the cream of the debate, found it provided for them in a certain part of the paper, with singular ability.

The parliamentary reporters of the present day amount to seventy or eighty in number. We will enter the gallery, and take a glance around. There, you see just below the gothic chair of the Speaker; before him the clerks at the table, on which the mace glitters, the symbol of authority, originally a club or instrument of war, made of iron and much used by cavalry, but in this instance gaily gilded, and adorned with a crown, a globe, and a cross; and the members, with their hats on, sitting or lounging on the benches, conversing about the bar, and leaving or entering the house; while here are the reporters in various attitudes. There is "The Times" looking at his finger nails, "The Chronicle" is taking a pinch of snuff, "The Herald" and the " Daily News" are laughing at some topic of mutual amusement, the reporters next to them yawn languidly, and not one of them is engaged in making a note, and why? It is quite enough that they have jotted down the name of the Hon. Member who is now " on his legs," though perhaps they may give him a few words in to-morrow's paper. Another and another rises, only to have, however, the same degree of attention; then comes one for whose " points" they wait; but now there is a man of mark; see how quickly their heads are inclined, with what railway speed there fingers move; you will have to-morrow, with wonderful accuracy, even at an early hour, when the paper is placed on your breakfast-table, with your coffee, toast, and eggs, not merely the speaker's thoughts, but ipsissima verba, his very words themselves.

Each reporter writes, or rather remains in the house, for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of that time his place is taken by another, to resume the debate where he left off; while away a cab wheels him to the room in the newspaper office, where he writes out his notes on successive slips of paper, a boy standing ready to convey them to the compositor; and thus it is no unusual thing for the first part of a speech to be in type in the Strand, and in Printing-house Square, while the senator is actually delivering the remainder. More than this, the first part of a debate of special interest may be read in the evening in some of our metropolitan institutions, while the remainder is going on vigorously within the chamber of the palace at Westminster!

But we must pause: our present illustrations must suffice, of

66

FOLLOWING A SPEAKER."

BIRMINGHAM AND HER MANU-
FACTURES.

2.-THE IRON COUNTRY.-NAILORS. SMELTING.—
PUDDLING.-ROLLING.

BEFORE we knock at the door of the Birmingham manufacturer, and demand admission to his workshops, it is necessary, for reasons which the reader will not be long in discovering, that we should take a preliminary ramble through some portion at

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It is a damp, close, and cloudy, but rainless morning early in November. We have dropped from one of the stages on the Stour Valley Railway, into a new world, a world bristling with stunted towers capped with flame, and tall black chimneys vomiting forth clouds of blacker smoke, which covers the whole region with a dismal canopy. Far away to the north a faint breeze, has lifted the sulphurous curtain, and a line of white light reveals the distant horizon; but that horizon, as far as the eye can penetrate, is striped with the perpendicular forms of innumerable chimneys, whose summits appear to support the sombre covering of dusky vapour that overshadows us, as the pillars of a temple support the roof. The soil beneath our feet is ink black; the air we breathe is hot and stifling, as though every inspiration we draw had first gone through the process of singeing for our particular benefit; our nostrils are assailed with the smell of vulcanized oxygen; and in our ears the incessant bang, and clang, and roar, and boom of ponderous hammers thunder without the pause of a single moment. We are in the Iron Country.

least of the outlying district of South Staffordshire. | to a heavy mass of " rag" stone, probably brought Iron is not made in Birmingham, though there there for the purpose of such anchorage; while a ten thousand different things are made of it. It small square patch of land in the rear, upon which comes into Birmingham, for the most part, as do the occupant of the cottage had made a desperate most other metals, in a hundred different shapes, attempt at a cabbage-garden, has slipped down to prepared for the convenience of the workman, from a perpendicular position, and the blackened stumps the shapeless ore of the mine. To begin our of the forlorn cabbages stick out horizontally, like survey at the beginning, we must transport our- broken rows of buttons on the ragged coat of a selves for a brief season to the iron district, and way-side vagrant. We are in the Iron Country. there take a hasty glance at what we shall find On we go through mud and mire, and black going on. steaming pools of water, crossing sloughs neckdeep upon planks of sodden timber, and stumbling along extempore railroads laid upon loose logs imbedded in the swampy soil. Here and there among the mounds of cinder and scoria, a bank of scorched and soot-clad grass lifts its once green top above the reeking ruins, over which a solitary tree, shorn of half its branches, stretches its jagged arms imploringly, and flutters its last few November leaves in deprecation of its impending fate, which is to be sawn into sleepers for the rails of the jolting tramway, or hewn into a prop to support some falling cabin. A sharp turn round a corner brings us suddenly to the banks of a canal of dark brown water, upon which long black barges loaded with coal and coal dust, and drawn by ropes harnessed to asses, are passing and repassing, amid the exchange of savage compliments belched forth from swart unshaven throats. A bridge of rickety planks, supported upon a couple of buttresses of uncemented bricks, just high enough to allow of the passage of a barge beneath, spans the canal at the distance of a hundred yards from where we stand; but to reach it we have to surmount the piles of smoking rubbish which bar the way. We are on the point of making the attempt, but are deterred by the sudden ejaculation from a moving mass of indescribable bundling, crouched a few yards in our rear, of "Cant crass theer! ya'll burn yer fut! must go roun to bridge." Round we go accordingly, trebling the distance, and, crossing the bridge, wander on amid the roaring din of clanging hammers, accompanied by an incomprehensible and portentous sound, deep as the bass of an organ, which thrills through every nerve and sets one's very bones a vibrating, and never intermits for a moment. Our way now leads by various sinuous windings, through a series of black and dusty mounds, at the base of which groups of nondescript creatures are employed, digging, shoveling, sifting in sieves, and wheeling in barrows, and gradually undermining the masses that overshadow them. It is difficult at the first view to guess their sex; they wear the wrecks of men's hats, and scare-crow coats that once were men's are fastened round their waists with leathern belts, or remnants of old neck-tyes; and they use coarse men's coarse language, and bandy rude jokes; but their nether limbs are swathed in womanly attire, coarse and wretched though it be, and alas! women they are, abandoned, as appears to a spectator at least, to a miserable and most unwomanly lot. We are in the Iron Country.

We walk on, and leaving the railway route in our rear, direct our steps towards a point in the distance where the chimneys appear clustered the closest, and the smoke to have gathered the densest. There is no read to walk on worthy of the name, but a wheel-track of deep ruts through a bed of mud. The whole surface of the land, to the last square inch of it, has been turned upside down. The deep channel of mire through which we flounder on, winds its serpentine way between huge mounds of grey, red, and black masses of vitrified scoria, the fæcula of unnumbered furnaces. The intervals between these artificial hillocks are mostly stagnant pools of dark brown water, mantled over with a green metallic scum, upon the edge of which, here and there, far down beneath the level of the roadway, wretched huts and tumble-down sheds, proclaim by a stream of smoke issuing from a chimney of loose bricks, that there human habitants are content to rot or to riot, as it may be, in damp and filthy discomfort. Now we are on the outskirts of what should be a village, but which is in reality little more than a monstrous mass of dislocated building materials. Here a red-bricked cottage has fallen bodily back upon the bank of cinders behind it, the window-frames of the upper story still sticking to the woodwork of the lower, which retains its perpendicular and its tenants to boot, for an old woman is on her knees scrubbing the floor, and we can see the pot boiling on the fire in preparation for dinner. A neighbouring cottage which has shown symptoms of epilepsy, is bound down to good behaviour by a strong chain cable, twisted three times round its waist, and fastened

On again, skirting a monster factory whose iron pulses throb with never-tiring energy, whose tall chimney spreads a permanent pall of sable over the rugged earth, and whose pyramidal towers shoot forth tongues of flame. On, past numberless little brick erections, consisting of a square-columned

rounded with the proportions of beauty, lean and lank? Why do the children scuttle away to the rear of the cottage? and why does the little lustre in the daughter's eye wax dimmer yet, as the father, slouching forward with heavy tread, swings his broad round shoulders into the open doorway? We know no answer to all these questions, save and except that we are in the Iron Country.

We must on yet once more, through the straggling hamlet and its outlying wildernesses of rubbish-through desolate fields where grass refuses to grow, but merely lives a blighted life, and where if it would grow, the cattle would refuse to eat itthrough narrow lanes and squashy footways, with here a shed, and there a kiln, and everywhere a "whimsey," pawing up and down in the air in token of the hard work it is accomplishing at a depth of sixty or seventy fathoms below the surface. We must go on even though we should be benighted in returning; for we mean to take a glance at the nail-makers, a small community of whom are located in this neighbourhood. So we put the "best foot foremost," by which means we soon leave the worst of the way behind us, and by dint of an hour's uphill walking, arrive at the village of - whose population are mostly nailors.

flue, a long boiler naked to the winds of heaven, | youth, dim and leaden ? and limbs that should be and a little one-eyed brick cottage, from whose one eye a long iron arm keeps perpetually pawing up and down, over a collection of wheels of all diameters, continually revolving, and which assemblage of contrivances a traveller, whom we interrogate on the subject, informs us is denominated a "whimsey." On, past solid acres of refuse and scoria, more solid acres of coal-breeze and dusty fuel, and all piled remorselessly upon a soil undermined in every part, ploughed up in every part, scorched and fire-blasted in every part, laid waste and desolate in every part, where a dormouse or a beetle could scarcely find food, or a sparrow a nest, where the song of the lark is never heard, or the wing of the butterfly glimmers in the sunshine. On, through crowds of busy forms, clustering like bees around their fiery hives, feeding the hungry furnaces, and raking in their blazing throats, dragging dazzling masses of white-hot metal along the ground, whirling it aloft and brandishing it in the air, and disappearing in the gloomy recesses of their cyclopean caverns. On, through a lane of smoking kilns and rows of blacksmiths' forges, more mountains of coal-breeze and iron cinders, more stagnant ponds and tumble-down cabins, more tram-roads, submerged in mud, and more wildernesses of brick and stone; and out at last upon a little patch of unviolated earth, only a small angular patch of a few rods, and there stands a little chapel of dingy brick, bearing an inscription on its front, which assigns it to a very respectable body. The chapel is itself a monument and an exemplar of the lesson it was designed to teach, of the perishing nature of all earthly things. Small as it is-and it would barely accommodate a hundred people-the thin crust of earth upon which it was built was not strong enough to support the foundations; they have sunk below their original bed, and a ghastly rent in the main wall of the building gives a prophetic warning of what may be expected when the next disturbance takes place in the mine beneath. We are in the Iron Country.

On again, with unwearied foot: the natural clouds are passing away, and the artificial ones, the sable plumes that nod from the summits of the fiery columns, catch a lighter hue from the sun's rays. The hour of noon is drawing near as we approach a straggling hamlet, a nameless cluster of half-built half-dilapidated sheds and cottages, which form the homes of the toiling Vulcans of the district. Children with unwashed faces are dabbling in the mire, or seated brawling on the door-steps. A savoury odour issues forth from open doors and windows; and from lattice and casement, wives, mothers, and daughters project their yellow faces, and peer up and down the road, watching for the coming of fathers, husbands, and brothers to the midday repast. What mean these haggard aspects and woe-begone glances of the matron and the mother? What mean the sallow countenance and cavernous cheeks of the young girl in her teens ? Why is the neck that should be white, and delicate, and fair, and fashioned in the mould of natural grace and loveliness, neither white nor fair, nor wellformed, but yellow, and jaundiced, and wrinkled, and disfigured by a huge unsightly wen in the throat, bigger than a pigeon's crop? Why are eyes that should be bright with the natural gaiety of

Perhaps in this time of general commercial activity and industrial prosperity, the most melancholy spectacle which the Iron Country can afford is that of the poor nailor's home. At a time when machines are in constant operation making nails at the rate of hundreds, and of some sorts thousands a minute, the nailor pits himself against them, making nails singly, by hand. Let us enter the nailor's miserable cottage, and glance at his home, his profession, and his prospects. At the time of our arrival he is sitting at his forge fire, which fronts the lane, and he and his family of three girls and a boy are dining upon bread and a modicum of soap-like cheese. The repast is soon finished, and he and they betake themselves again to their occupation. One small forge, round which the girls sit, each in front of a little anvil, suffices for them all. They are supplied with bundles of small iron rods weighed out to them by their employers, and which they have to make into nails of certain patterns, returning the weight, deducting a certain allowance for loss in the manufacture. One is making "brads," another the long nails known as tenpenny-nails," and a third is fashioning clouts." The father, who can make "any nail that ever was made," takes all kinds of work, and is well off just now in having a commission for horse-shoe nails, the fabrication of which pays better than any other sort. He is a man of fiveand forty years of age, but he looks sixty: poverty, hunger, and the long sieges which he has endured in periods of strikes, have done the work of years upon his frame. Like the ancient mariner, he is lean and leaden-eyed;" there appears to be hardly a pound of flesh on his bones; Shylock would have found it difficult to have enforced his penalty upon him. His sole recreation is, perhaps, the beer-shop, and his one standing enjoyment, the quid of tobacco that revolves under his tongue. His only son, who is not above eleven years of age, seems to have enough to do in attending upon. his father and sisters, in blowing the patched and

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a fountain of fire, which rapidly covers the whole floor in broad bands of white light, intersected, at regular intervals, by smaller cross bars. The sudden emission of this burning sea has increased the temperature of the place to such a pitch that we are compelled to sally out into the open air to fetch breath, leaving the pigs to the possession of their sweltering stye.

appearance than they exhibited by the light of day. The flickering fire-light gives a rosy colouring to their pale, sallow, and hungry features; their ragged costume is concealed in the deep shadows cast by the flame, and the horizontal shower of sparks which fly from their busy hammers, fringe them with a border of fireworks which recals the merry close of a gala day. The good wife, an anxious, way-worn, careful-faced matron, has come This process seems simple enough, and, to the back from the town, and the nailor volunteers him- indifferent observer, it might appear that few trades self to show us to the nearest station. He has not are easier to learn than the iron-smelter's, who has much of a toilet to make by way of preparation-only to melt down the ore and cast it into these only to cast off his leathern apron, indue some three-fifths of what was once a tolerable surtout, and bury his prematurely grizzled head in a hat much too big for him, and he is ready.

rough, homely-shaped bars, called "pigs." But the fact is, that a considerable degree of chemical knowledge, and no small experience in the practice of the art, is necessary to the successful carrying The route to the railway station does not lie out even of this the first process in the manufacture through the way we came, but through a district of iron. The construction of the furnace, in the in all respects similar, save that it seems to be, if first place, is a matter of vital importance, and so possible, still more crowded with furnaces, work- is its constant preservation in an efficient state; shops and factories, among which we plunge at in the next place, the proportions of the materials once, so soon as we have descended the hill. Being to be consigned to it-of the iron-stone or ore, in no immediate hurry to get home, we advise the lime-stone, and the fuel-must be most accuwith our friend as to the practicability of inspect-rately determined; then the blast of air must be ing the interior of some of these flaming dens of steadily and regularly maintained; and even the labour, with the view of verifying the little know- direction of the wind and the state of the atmoledge we had picked up on the subject of iron- sphere have to be taken into account, inasmuch as making. the operations of the furnace are affected by them. During the whole of the smelting process, a wary and vigilant watch must be kept upon what is going on in the interior of the furnace, or the object in view may be defeated by atmospheric causes alone. It is said that, upon the average, much better iron is drawn from the furnace in winter than in summer; but it is seldom possible to predicate with accuracy the precise quality of the yield at any season of the year, seeing that so many circumstances must be favourable, and so much caution must be used in combining the proportions of ore, of flux and of fuel, in order to insure the best possible result. Perhaps the produce of the most prosperous castings are but approximations to complete success.

"You can see the very first part of the business here by, sir, if you like; they'll be smelting just now, over at

if you like to step across.'

"By all means," said we; and in a few minutes we were within the smelting-house, where pigs (of iron) were about to be born for our especial accommodation, as it happened. The birth of these pigs is not the most agreeable spectacle for a nervous person. First of all, the heat of the cast-house is enormously above the comfortable point. The blast furnace, where by means of currents of air forced in by a powerful steam engine, repeated charges of ore from the mine, of fuel, and of limestone, have in the course of the last ten or twelve hours been melted down to three or four tons of liquid iron, will not permit of the approach of any one who cannot tolerate a temperature of 120 degrees at the least. Nevertheless, an old, sapless, wiry-faced, whiskerless man of sixty, bends over an orifice in the furnace, in which he is routing with a crooked kind of poker, coaxing and humouring the vitreous slag and scum to dribble forth upon the ground beneath. He knows by the appearance of this floating refuse, the condition of the fluid metal below; and not till he is satisfied as to the quality of the liquid mass, will he suffer it to be drawn from the furnace.

The floor of the cast-room is covered with moulds of moist sand, which, in this instance, are of the very simplest kind, and such as may be constructed with the greatest readiness; they are little more than mere channels for the metal to run in, as all that is wanted to be produced is logs of iron, to be afterwards appropriated to the various uses, and subjected to the various processes, for which manufacturers may require it. All being ready for the cast, we are motioned to stand clear, which we do by mounting upon a pile of rubbish as near to the wall and as far from the furnace as possible. In a moment the dam-stone is tapped by hooking out the plug of mingled clay and sand, and forth rushes

Pig iron may be regarded as the raw material, in the roughest form in which it comes into the manufacturing market. It is by no means pure metal, fragments of charcoal, of unmelted ore, and of earthy material being apparent, upon close inspection, by the eye alone. From causes with which we are imperfectly acquainted, pig iron is of very various quality, some being coarse-grained and of a dark colour, others silvery white and of crystalline structure, and others again of an intermediate quality. The dark cross-grained iron is sufficiently soft to yield to the action of the file, and is slightly malleable; while the white and crystalline masses are so excessively hard as to defy the teeth of the file, and so brittle as to crack like glass upon being violently struck, or on any sudden alteration of temperature. Cast iron, in order to be rendered malleable and fit for general purposes, has to undergo the process of refining; this is accomplished by melting it again in a blast furnace, by which means a great portion of its carbon is driven off, and more scoria or oxide of iron is freed. At the refinery, it is run into shallow moulds and cast into plates, which are exceedingly brittle, and ready for the puddler.

Happily, the puddling, forging, and rolling