, more heroic, than those of the battle-field.

Such books as this under consideration give us only materials for the
great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own rhythm
and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage, rejoicing in the
fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving a sufficient income
from letting them out to his neighbors for the purpose of boring holes,
down to the true Thor's hammer, so tractable to the master's hand that
it can chip without breaking the end of an egg in a glass on the anvil,
crack a nut without touching the kernel, or strike a blow of ten tons
eighty times in a minute, we have a steady onward movement. Prejudice
builds its solid breakwaters; ignorance, inability, clumsiness, and
awkwardness raise such obstacles as they can; but the delay of a century
is but a moment. Slowly and surely the waters rise till they sweep away
all obstacles, overtop all barriers, and plunge forward again with ever
accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our glory
and of our humiliation,--a record of marvellous, inborn, God-given
genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass most beneficent
ends, but baffled, thwarted, fiercely and persistently resisted by
obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and gaining its ends, if it gain
them at all, only by address the most sagacious, courage the most
invincible, and perseverance the most untiring. Every great advance in
mechanical skill has been met by the determined hostility of men who
fancied their craft to be in danger. An invention which enabled a hand
of iron to do the work of fifty hands of flesh and blood was considered
guilty of taking the bread from the thrice fifty mouths that depended on
those hands' labor, and was not unfrequently visited with the punishment
due to such guilt. No demonstrated fruitlessness of similar fears in
the past served to allay fears for the future; no inefficiency of brute
force permanently to stay the enterprise of the mind prevented brute
force from making its futile and sometimes fatal attempts. It is no
matter that increased facility of production has been attended by an
increased demand for the product; it is no matter that ingenuity has
never been held permanently back from its carefully conned plans; there
have not been wanting men, numerous, ignorant, and ignoble enough to
collect in mobs, raze workshops, destroy machinery, chase away
inventors, and fancy, that,