Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 13.djvu/642

 636 Reviews and Literary Notices. [May, REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES. Industrial Biography : Iron- Workers and Tool- Makers. By SAMUEL SMILES, Author of " Self-Help," " Brief Biographies," and " Life of George Stephenson." Boston : Ticknor & Fields. THE history of iron is the history of civ- ilization. The rough, shapeless ore that lies hidden in the earth folds in its un- lovely bosom such fate and fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and huge of limb, bends slowly his brawny neck to the yoke of man, and at his bidding becomes a nimble servitor to do his will. Subtile as thought, rejoicing in power, no touch is too delicate for his perception, no service too mighty for his strength. Tales of faerie, feats of magic, pale before the simple story of his every-day labor, or find in his deeds the facts which they but faintly shadowed forth. And waiting upon his transformation, a tribe becomes a nation, a race of savages rises up philosophers, artists, gentlemen. Commerce, science, warfare have their progress and their vicissitudes ; but under- neath them all, unnoted, it may be, or treat- ed to a superficial and perhaps supercil- ious glance, yet mainspring and regulator of all, runs an iron thread, true thread of Fate, coiling around the limbs of man, and impeding all progress, till he shall have untwisted its Gordian knot, but bidding him forward from strength to strength with each successive release. No romance of court or camp surpasses the romance of the forge. A blacksmith at his anvil seems to us a respectable, but not an eminently heroic person ; yet, walking back ward along the past by the light which he strikes from the glowing metal beneath his hand, we shall fancy ourselves to be walking in the true heroic age. Kings and warriors have brandished their swords right royally, and such splendor has flashed from Excalibur and Morglay that our dazzled eyes have scarcely discerned the brawny smith who not only stood in the twilight of the back- ground and fashioned with skilful hand the blade which radiates such light, but passed through all the land, changing huts into houses, houses into homes, and trans- forming into a garden by his skill the wil- derness which had been rescued by the sword. Vigorous brains, clear eyes, sturdy arms have wrought out, not without blood, victories more potent, more permanent, more heroic, than those of the battle-field. Such books as this under consideration give us only materials for the great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own rhythm and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage, rejoic- ing in the fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving a sufficient income from letting them out to his neighbors for the purpose of boring holes, down to the true Thor's hammer, so tractable to the mat- ter's hand that it can chip without break ing the end of an egg in a glass on the an- vil, crack a nut without touching the ker- nel, or strike a blow often tons eighty times in a minute, we have a steady onward movement. Prejudice builds its solid break- waters ; ignorance, inability, clumsiness, and awkwardness raise such obstacles as they can ; but the delay of a century is' but a moment. Slowly and surely the waters rise till they sweep away all obstacles, over- top all barriers, and plunge forward again with ever accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our glory and of our humiliation, a record of marvellous, inborn, God-given genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass most be- neficent ends, but baffled, thwarted, fierce- ly and persistently resisted by obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and gaining its ends, if it gain them at all, only by ad- dress the most sagacious, courage the most invincible, and perseverance the most un- tiring. Every great advance in mechanical skill has been met by the determined hos- tility of men who fancied their craft to be in danger. An invention which enabled a hand of iron to do the work of fifty hands of flesh and blood was considered guilty of taking the bread from the thrice fifty mouths that depended on those hands' la- bor, and was not uufrequently visited with the punishment due to such guilt. No de-