he taxes on cattle! These free-traders
at Paris want to drive us out of our markets with meat on the hoof, and
killed meat, from all the ends of the world. Here they are trying to
patch up that treaty of commerce with Italy, and bring back all those
competing cattle from Sardinia. That's a pretty idea! and for those
Italians, who owe France everything and now lick the boots of M. de
Bismarck. And now the Paris Chamber of Commerce wants an International
Congress on treaties of commerce. The devil take the treaties of
commerce!'

At the station of La Fere I found waiting for me, one lovely morning in
July, the _coupe_ of M. Henrivaux, the director of the famous and
historical glassworks of St.-Gobain. When Arthur Young visited these
works in 1787, he found them turning out, in the midst of extensive
forests, 'the largest mirrors in the world.' The forests are less
extensive now, but St.-Gobain still turns out the largest mirrors in the
world. To this year's Exposition in Paris it has sent the most gigantic
mirror ever made, showing a surface of 31.28 metres; and the glory of
St.-Gobain is nightly proclaimed to the world at Paris by the electric
light which, from the summit of the Eiffel Tower, flashes out over the
great city and the valley of the Seine an auroral splendour of
far-darting rays, thanks to St.-Gobain and to the largest lens ever made
by man.

St.-Gobain, however, has other claims upon attention than its
unquestioned rank as the most important seat of one of the most
characteristic and important manufactures of our modern civilisation. In
a most interesting paper upon the life and labours of M. Augustin
Cochin, one of the most useful as well as one of the most distinguished
of the many useful and distinguished Frenchmen whose names are
associated with this great industry, M. de Falloux describes the works
of St.-Gobain as 'an industrial flower upon a seignorial stalk springing
from a feudal root.'

The description is both terse and pregnant. The history of this great
and flourishing industry, stretching back now over two centuries and a
half, is a history of evolution without revolution.

There is nothing in France more thoroughly French than St.-Gobain,
nothing which has suffered less from the successive Parisian earthquakes
of the past century, nothing which has preserved through them all more
of what was good in its original constitution and objects. The
establishment is like a green old oak, and, to