some factories so well managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood, were not to last more than four or five hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of varying it according to his tastes.
Look at this factory, unfortunately consecrated to engines of war. It is perfect as far as regards sanitary and intelligent organization. It occupies fifty English acres of land, fifteen of which are roofed with glass. The pavement of fire-proof bricks is as clean as that of a miner's cottage, and the glass roof is carefully cleaned by a gang of workmen who do nothing else. In this factory are forged steel ingots or blooms weighing as much as twenty tons; and when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace, whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do not guess its presence save when its great jaws open to let out a steel monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who now here, now there, open a tap, causing immense cranes to move by pressure of water in the pipes.
You enter expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers, and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic pressure, and instead of forging steel, the worker has but to turn a tap to give it shape, which makes a far more homo-
