230 Transactioxs of the American Institute. 



tools. No nation on earth can make them as good in quality, or as 

 cheap in price, as we can make them here. Sixteen years ago, I 

 went to Europe in company with the first President of the Republic 

 of Texas, Col. Ashbel Smith, late of the Confederate army, who 

 told me that, some time before, thinking the reported superiority 

 of Yankee tools all humbug, he had bought a liberal assortment 

 of the best edge-tools he could find in Great Britain, " and," said 

 he, " I could not get a single mechanic to use them, the American 

 tools were so much Ijctter and finer in quality." So to-day there 

 are selling in different British Colonies large invoices of Ames's 

 shovels and spades, which, after paying British duties, are still able 

 to undersell British manufacturers in their own market. Our reapers 

 and mowers defy competition, and take premiums in British and in 

 French World's Fairs. There is really no substantial competition 

 against us in those articles. American reapers and mowers are to- 

 day cutting and gathering the harvests of the civilized world; and 

 this, in spite of the enormous cheapness of European labor. A 

 British nobleman said of McCormick's reaper, when I Avas there 

 sixteen years ago, "It is not a question of cheapness at all with us; 

 we have often only two or three dry days in the harvest season, M'hile 

 W'Q have hundreds of acres of grain to harvest. Now, if we can get 

 a machine that will reap ten or fifteen or twenty acres in one day, its 

 value to us will be incalculable, although the cost of reaping may 

 be as great as would that of reaping by hand, because of the saving 

 in time, and because it will enable us to improve the favorable 

 season, so short and so precious." Our sewing machines also, 

 thoroughly American in their conception and in their perfection, 

 ai"e to-day clothing the armies of the civilized world; and before 

 long they Avill turn the blankets and girdles of tribes that are now 

 barbarous into shapely and gl'aceful garments. The electric tele- 

 graph, too, which was 'first made practicable by an American, now 

 flings its net-work over all nations, and the honor of first conceiving 

 and finally achieving the electric union of the rival hemispheres is 

 justly due to a citizen of New York. No man can now estimate what 

 is to be the value, the power, the civilizing influence, of this agency, 

 which is not yet a quarter of a century old, which has already 

 thrown its wires across from continent to continent, mid which to- 

 night is rendering accounts of the markets in all the cities of the 

 civilized world. But we claim no monopoly of creative genius. 

 We gladly admit that the steam engine is British, though the 

 steamboat i^ clearly American. The spinning-jenny and the power- 



