It at present employs seven hundred hands, of whom two hundred are apprentices, and of the remainder, between fifty and sixty English. The range of its productions includes every species of machine used for spinning flax, cotton, silk, or wool, as well as for other manufactures in which machinery is required, for which there is a brisk demand at present, not only in Belgium, but for Spain, Austria, France and Holland. In point of finish and beauty, the spinning machinery is certainly, as I have said, inferior to the English, it is also stated to be defective in other respects, but those proprietors of mills who are using it, made no complaints to me upon the subject, and seemed perfectly satisfied with its execution. Some of the heavier articles in process of construction, especially a spiral roving-frame which some English workmen were completing, seemed, in every respect both of finish and action, to be quite equal to those made at Manchester and Leeds. The establishment contains a preparatory workshop on a comprehensive scale, fitted up with small tools and machinery, and superintended by two competent directors, solely for the instruction of apprentices, and its success we were told had been most gratifying. The Englishmen employed at the Phœnix receive higher wages than the Flemings, but the majority of them are only retained till their original engagements shall have been completed, when their services will be dispensed with, and their places supplied by native workmen, at wages not exceeding twenty francs per week, and fully competent to undertake their duties. One important feature in this immense manufactory is, that it is gradually succeeding in making its own tools, instead of importing them as heretofore from England. The majority of those in use had been already constructed upon the spot upon English models, and at the moment we called, a planing machine, twenty feet long, was in process of erection, together with drills, sliding lathes, dividing and filing apparatus, and in short, every description of tool in use in Great Britain. In this respect, the directors assured me of their confidence of being, for the future, perfectly independent of any supply from abroad--but I should add, that afterwards at the rival establishment at Seraing, where all the tools are imported from England, I was told that those made at the Phœnix were not only much more expensive, but of inferior quality. The works were in full employment at the period of our visit, from the fact of there being three flax spinning mills in course of construction in Ghent; but it remains to be seen whether its present vigorous prosperity is the result of a permanent cause, and whether the career of Belgian manufactures, and the demand created in consequence, will be such as to maintain in remunerative operation this splendid establishment, as well as that of Seraing and the minor works of the same kind at Brussels, Verviers, Namur, Charleroi and elsewhere.