, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks,
gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades.
The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable.

When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his
spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny." The machine was
fine, delicate, subtle, and as spinning was a woman's business anyway,
the new machine was parsed in the feminine gender.

Soon the new invention took on a heavier and stronger form, and its
persistency suggested to some other merry bucolic a new variation and it
was called a "mule." The word stuck, and the mule-spinner is with us
wherever cotton is spun.

The discovery that coal was valuable for fuel followed the invention of
the steam-engine.

When things are needed we dig down and find them, or reach up and secure
them. You could not run a steamship, except along a river with
well-wooded banks, any more than you could run an automobile with coal.

The dealing in coal, or "coals" as our English cousins still use the
word, began in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen. That was the year the first
steamship, the "Savannah," crossed the ocean. She ran from Savannah to
London. Her time was twenty-five days. She burned four hundred fifty
tons of coal, or about two-thirds of her entire carrying capacity.
Robert Fulton had been running his steamer "Clermont" on the Hudson in
Eighteen Hundred Seven, but there were wooding-stations every twenty
miles.

It was argued in the House of Commons that no steamship could ever cross
the Atlantic with steam, alone, as a propelling power. And even as it
was being mathematically proved, the whistle of the "Savannah" drowned
the voice of the orator.

But the "Savannah" also carried sail, and so the doubters still held the
floor. An iron boat with no sails that could cross the Atlantic in five
days was a miracle that no optimist had foreseen--much less, dared
prophesy.

The new conditions almost threatened to depopulate the rural districts.
Farmers forsook the soil. The uncertainty of a crop was replaced with
the certainty of a given wage. Children could tend the spinning-jennies
as well as men. There was a demand for child labor. Any poor man with a
big family counted himself rich. Many a man who could not find a job at
a man's wage quit work and was supported by his wife and children. To
rear a family became a paying enterprise.

Various mill-owners adopted children or took them under t