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 the rest to respect its trade and its subjects. In 1655 the British admiral, Robert Blake, was sent to teach them a lesson, and he gave the Tunisians a severe beating. A long series of expeditions was undertaken by the British fleet during the reign of Charles II., sometimes single-handed, sometimes in combination with the Dutch. In 1682 and 1683 the French bombarded Algiers. On the second occasion the Algerines blew the French consul from a gun during the action. An extensive list of such punitive expeditions could be made out, down to the American operations of 1801–5 and 1815. But in no case was the attack pushed home, and it rarely happened that the aggrieved Christian state refused in the end to make a money payment in order to secure peace. The frequent wars among them gave the pirates numerous opportunities of breaking their engagements, of which they never failed to take advantage.

After the general pacification of 1815, the suppression of African piracy was universally felt to be a necessity. The insolence of a Tunisian squadron which sacked Palma in the island of Sardinia and carried off 158 of its inhabitants, roused widespread indignation. Other influences were at work to bring about their extinction. Great Britain had acquired Malta and the Ionian Islands and had now many Mediterranean subjects. She was also engaged in pressing the other European powers to join with her in the suppression of the slave trade which the Barbary states practised on a large scale and at the expense of Europe. The suppression of the trade was one of the objects of the congress of Vienna. Great Britain was called on to act for Europe, and in 1816 Lord Exmouth was sent to obtain treaties from Tunis and Algiers. His first visit produced diplomatic documents and promises and he sailed for England. While he was negotiating, a number of British subjects had been brutally ill-treated at Bona, without his knowledge. The British government sent him back to secure reparation, and on the 27th of August, in combination with a Dutch squadron under Admiral Van de Capellen, he administered a smashing bombardment to Algiers. The lesson terrified the pirates both of that city and of Tunis into giving up over 3000 prisoners and making fresh promises. But they were not reformed and were not capable of reformation. Algiers renewed its piracies and slave-taking, though on a smaller scale, and the measures to be taken with it were discussed at the conference or congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. In 1824 another British fleet under Admiral Sir Harry Neal had again to bombard Algiers. The great pirate city was not in fact thoroughly tamed till its conquest by France in 1830.

 BARBAULD, ANNA LETITIA (1743–1825), English poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Kibworth-Harcourt, in Leicestershire, on the 20th of June 1743. Her father, the Rev. John Aikin, a Presbyterian minister and schoolmaster, taught his daughter Latin and Greek. In 1758 Mr Aikin removed his family to Warrington, to act as theological tutor in a dissenting academy there. In 1773 Miss Aikin published a volume of Poems, which was very successful, and co-operated with her brother, Dr John Aikin, in a volume of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. In 1774 she married Rochemont Barbauld, a member of a French Protestant family settled in England. He had been educated in the academy at Warrington, and was minister of a Presbyterian church at Palgrave, in Suffolk, where, with his wife’s help, he established a boarding school. Her admirable Hymns in Prose and Early Lessons were written for their pupils. In 1785 she left England for the continent with her husband, whose health was seriously impaired. On their return about two years later, Mr Barbauld was appointed to a church at Hampstead. In 1802 they removed to Stoke Newington. Mrs Barbauld became well known in London literary circles. She collaborated with Dr Aikin in his Evenings at Home; in 1795 she published an edition of Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination, with a critical essay; two years later she edited Collins’s Odes; in 1804 she published a selection of papers from the English Essayists, and a selection from Samuel Richardson’s correspondence, with a biographical notice; in 1810 a collection of the British Novelists (50 vols.) with biographical and critical notices; and in 1811 her longest poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, giving a gloomy view of the existing state and future prospects of Britain. This poem anticipated Macaulay in contemplating the prospect of a visitor from the antipodes regarding at a future day the ruins of St Paul’s from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge. Mrs Barbauld died on the 9th of March 1825; her husband had died in 1808. A collected edition of her works, with memoir, was published by her niece, Lucy Aikin, in 2 vols., 1825.

 BARBECUE (Span. barbacoa), originally a framework on posts placed over a fire on which to dry or smoke meat; hence, a gridiron for roasting whole animals, and in Cuba an upper floor on which fruit or grain is stored. In the United States the word means an open-air feast, either political or social, where whole animals are roasted and eaten and hogsheads of beer and other vast quantities of food and drink consumed.

 BARBED WIRE, a protective variety of fencing, consisting usually of several strands of wire twisted together with sharp spikes or points clinched or fastened into the strands.

In the United States, barbed wire for fencing was originally suggested to meet conditions existing in the western states, by reason of the large cattle-raising industry in sections where timber was scarce. Prior to its introduction, a No. 9 round or oval iron wire was popular on the frontier of the United States and in South America, as a fencing material. Large amounts were used annually for this purpose, but iron lacked strength, and single wire strand was not fully satisfactory on account of stretching in warm and contracting in cold weather, and of thus being broken. Cattle would rub against a smooth fence, and this constant pressure loosened the posts and broke the wire. To overcome this defect, ingenious people—the most successful being farmers—set themselves to find a way by which wire could be used and at the same time be free from destruction by the animals it was intended to confine. This investigation resulted in the invention of barbed wire. Soon after, automatic machinery was invented for rapidly and cheaply placing the barb upon the smooth wire, so that the cost of barbed wire is much less than the cost of smooth wire when it was in general use. So immediately did barbed wire find favour with the farmers of the United States, and, in fact, all over the world, that the manufacture of wire was revolutionized.

The history of barbed wire fencing is of recent date. In the United States—the real home of this industry—patents were taken out by Lucien B. Smith, Kent, Ohio, in 1867; by William B. Hunt, of Scott, N.Y., at almost the same time; and by Michael Kelly, of New York, a year later. The practical beginning of the industry, however, was in the patents issued to Joseph F. Glidden, De Kalb, Ill., 1874, on barbed fence wire, and during the same year, to Joseph F. Glidden and Phineas W. Vaughan, for a machine to manufacture the same. These inventions were the foundation of the system of patents under which barbed wire has been protected and sold. The development of the barbed wire industry would hardly have been possible without steel. Iron wire, used for fencing prior to the introduction of steel, was not suitable, seeing that iron does not possess sufficient tensile strength and lacks homogeneity, qualities which Bessemer and open-hearth steels possess in a high degree.

The advantages of galvanized barbed wire fencing are that it is almost imperishable, is no burden on the posts; does not 