Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/18

4 suggestions for going to work to coin these deposits into a currency better than gold alone to the country.

There are no statistics attainable to show the yearly produce of this section, or the wealth it has created. One would be inclined to believe, on seeing the black forest of chimneys smoking over large towns and villages as well as the flayed spaces between, that all the coal and iron mined in the district must be used in it. The furnaces, foundries, and manufactories seem almost countless; and the vastness and variety of their production infinite. Still, like an ever-flowing river, running through a sandy region that drinks in but part of its waters, there is a stream of raw mineral wealth flowing without bar or break through the absorbing district that produces it, and watering distant counties of England. By night and day, year in year out, century in and century out, runs that stream with unabated flow. Narrow canals filled with water as black as the long sharp boats it floats, crossing each other here and there in the thick of the furnaces, twist out into the green lands in different directions, laden with coal for distant cities and villages. The railways, crossing the canals and their creeping locomotion, dash off with vast loads to London and other great centres of consumption. Tons unnumbered of iron for distant manufactures go