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The 30,000,000 horse-power now available, if produced in our most modern electric plants, would require the burning of nearly 225,000,000 tons of coal, and if in the average plant run by steam-engines, more than 650,000,000 tons of coal, which is fifty per cent. more than all the coal that is now produced in this country.
Now, the condition of this class here is precisely the same as its condition in England; it is entirely dependent upon the will of the trader: not because by law are they forced thereto, but because the rich alone, being able to advance the capital necessary for factories, steam-engines, and workshops, the poor are obliged to work for them upon the masters' own conditions.
In America, economy in the consumption of fuel has been much promoted by the substitution of coal for wood, the general use of stoves both for wood and coal, and recently by the employment of anthracite in the furnaces of stationary and locomotive steam-engines.
This London City, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what is it but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One; a huge immeasurable Spirit of a THOUGHT, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, Palaces, Parliaments, Hackney Coaches, Katherine Docks, and the rest of it!
And wonderfully strange it is, that notwithstanding all the march of enlightenment, notwithstanding our progressive discoveries in the laws of Nature, our railways, steam-engines, animal magnetism, and electrobiology, we have never made any improvement that is generally acknowledged, since men ceased to be troglodytes and nomads, in the old-fashioned gamut of flats and sharps, which attunes into irregular social jog-trot all the generations that pass from the cradle to the grave; still, "the desire for something have have not" impels all the energies that keep us in movement, for good or for ill, according to the checks or the directions of each favourite desire.
The American manufacturers and tramway companies, in their keen competition with one another and perfect freedom to compete on even terms with horse traction, soon took the lead in all matters pertaining to electric traction, and the British public, at the close of the nineteenth century, have had to witness the humiliating spectacle of their own public authorities being forced to import electrical apparatus, and even steam-engines applicable to dynamos used for tramway purposes, from the other side of the Atlantic!
There is an inclosure where steam-engines are smoking and puffing, and threshing-machines are making a clamor; where some big church-bells hang, and where there are a few stalls for horses and cattle. But the competing horses and cattle are led before the judges elsewhere; the horses, for instance, by the royal stables in the city.
The steam-engine was first used for pumping, then for turning machinery, then for propelling boats, and now its crowning department is seen in the locomotive. There is a plan, a likeness, a similarity, which runs through all steam-engines, whether they be found in the mine, in the mill, beneath the deck of the steamship, or on the railroad track.
Two Arrows almost gave up the sullen pride that refused to be astonished, and Sile began to understand "sign language." At all events he nearly twisted himself out of shape in an effort to explain to his captive the nature of ships, cannon, camels, and steam-engines. He felt as if he were a sort of missionary.
The comfort of the passenger, equally with the safety of the hull, demands the diminution of the vibration nuisance in modern steamships, and whether the first attempts to cater for the need by turbine-engines be fully successful or not, there is no doubt whatever that the fast mail packets of the future will be driven by steam-engines constructed on a system in which the turbine principle will form an important part.
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