342 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and it now only remains for them to fit themselves and their families 

 for a rational use and enjoyment of the fruits of their toil. In looking 

 back over the sad and gloomy fields of suffering among the European 

 mines and works which I have traversed so often, and in looking for- 

 ward to the more cheerful prospect now spread out before the sons of 

 toil, I am tempted to exclaim with the patriarch : " Lord, now lettest 

 Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy sal- 

 vation." 



But cheap iron is a blessing to mankind, and to deprive the world 

 of it is a calamity so serious that no one can contemplate it without 

 a feeling of reluctance. Here, again, science steps in to reconcile high 

 wages with cheap iron. It is the mission of science to cheapen pro- 

 cesses, which enables wages to be raised without enhancing the cost 

 of the product of the world. The history of industry is full of ex- 

 amples of the truth of this proposition, but for our purpose the Bes- 

 semer process affords its best illustration. By the genius of one man 

 the whole world is enriched, its comforts enlarged, its progress pro- 

 moted, and new fields of art and industry opened to its enterprise and 

 energy. The annual saving in carrying on the business and transporta- 

 tion of the world can only be measured by millions ; and when equal 

 genius is applied to the proper distribution of the savings produced by 

 the Bessemer process, by the Danks puddler, and other economical 

 processes that have been and will be invented, the laboring classes all 

 over the world will be lifted out of the depths, and this earth become 

 the paradise it was intended to be, when the Great Giver of all en- 

 dowed it with so much beauty and such boundless sources of wealth, 

 and made the forces of Nature to be the servants of man, whenever he 

 learns how to use and govern them. You, gentlemen, have limited 

 yourselves to the study of physical laws and their application to indus- 

 try, but I hope to see the day when all over this land, and throughout 

 the world, there will be similar associations devoting themselves with 

 equal zeal and intelligence to the discovery of the laws upon which 

 society should be organized, and to the application of these laws to the 

 proper distribution of the fruits of industry among those who labor for 

 their production ; so that nowhere in the world, and least of all in this 

 land of boundless resources, shall it be said that there are idle hands 

 because there is no work to be done, or that there are want and misery 

 because there is not a just division of the proceeds of industry. If 

 then, my views in regard to the dignity and importance of your mis- 

 sion be correct, you have not associated yourselves together one day 

 too soon. You can derive encouragement from the magnificent results 

 already achieved by your sister association, the British Iron and Steel 

 Institute, only two years your senior, which has already given to the 

 world several volumes of papers of inestimable value, and among them 

 that admirable treatise of J. Lowthian Bell, on " the Chemical Phe- 

 nomena of Iron Smelting," wherein the laws covering the operation of 



