ufactory had to pay a heavy fine for its patriotism. But it
avails itself as readily of German as of French science to-day, and I
found M. Henrivaux entirely and minutely familiar with the very latest
phenomena of the great change which is coming over the glassworks, as
well as all the other industries, of Pittsburg, through the use there of
natural gas instead of coal gas and coal. All the most recently invented
furnaces--English, German, American--have been tried and tested here as
soon as they were made; and the latest American 'crushers' and
'regulators' get to St.-Gobain as soon as they do to Pittsburg. The
materials which go to the making of a plate-glass mirror pass through
seven processes before the original heap of pebbles, dust, and ashes is
transformed into a sheet of splendour and light.

A hundred years ago more than ten days were required to complete these
seven processes, from the crushing and mixing and putting into the
furnace of the soda and the silicious sand and the charcoal and the lime
and the broken glass, called here _calcin_, through the fusion, and the
moulding, and the squaring, and the smoothing, and the washing, and the
polishing. Now this is all done in half the time--127 hours instead of
246.

With all this the condition of the workmen employed at St.-Gobain has
also steadily improved. It seems always to have been good, relatively to
the general conditions of workmen in other industries and other
establishments in France. Under the original statutes, and in the time
of the excellent M. Deslandes, the nominee of Madame Geoffrin, who ruled
St.-Gobain with great success from 1759 down to the Revolution, the
workmen of St.-Gobain, as I have shown, were looked after, as well as
kept to their duty, on strictly patriarchal principles, not likely to
find favour in modern eyes. That they did not themselves dislike the
system may be inferred from the fact that no such thing as a strike has
ever been known at St.-Gobain, and that a considerable proportion of the
workmen employed here now are the direct descendants of workmen employed
here in the last century. There are even workers by inheritance, as men
may be soldiers and sailors or magistrates by inheritance. Of course
with the great extension in our own time of the operation of the
company, great numbers of workmen other than glassworkers have come into
its employment. But in the glass manufactures alone there are now
employed: at St.-Gobain 375