[Illustration: Carpenters and their tools. (From an old German woodcut.)] By the use of those machines we are told that twenty men can make panelled doors at the rate of a hundred a day--that is, one man can make five doors. A panelled door is a very expensive part of an English house; and so are window-frames and staircases. If doors and windows and staircases can be made cheaper, more houses and better houses will be built; and thus more carpenters will be employed in building than if those parts of a house were made by hand. The same principle applies to machines as to tools. If carpenters had not tools to make houses, there would be few houses made; and those that were made would be as rough as the hut of the savage who has no tools. The people would go without houses, and the carpenter would go without work,--to say nothing of the people, who would also go without work, that now make tools for the carpenter. We build in this country more of brick than of stone, because brick-earth is found almost everywhere, and stone fit for building is found only in particular districts. Bricks used to pay the state a duty of five shillings and ten pence a thousand; and yet at the kilns they were to be bought under forty shillings a thousand, which is less than a halfpenny apiece. The government wisely resolved, in 1850, to repeal the excise-duty on bricks. In 1845 the duty on glass was repealed. In 1847 the timber-duties were reduced; and in 1848 they were further reduced. The ever-present necessities of the people--the absolute want of house-accommodation for a population increasing so rapidly--rendered it a paramount duty of the government no longer to let tax interfere with the cheap building of houses. Every invention that adds to cheapness acts in the same direction; for although the direct taxes cease to press upon the various trades of building, the constant demand keeps bricks and timber at a price almost as high as before the removal or mitigation of the tax. But bricks, regarded as the production of a vast amount of labour, are intrinsically cheap. And why? Because they are made by what is truly machinery; as they were made three thousand years ago by the Egyptians. The clay is ground in a horse-mill; the wooden mould, in which every brick is made singly, is a copying machine. One brick is exactly like another brick. Every brick is of the form of the mould in which it is made. Without the mould the workman could not make the brick of uniform dimensions; and without this uniformity the after labour of putting bricks together would be greatly increased. Without the mould the workman could not form the bricks quickly;--his own labour would be increased ten-fold. The simple machine of the mould not only gives employment to a great many brickmakers who would not be employed at all, but also to a great many bricklayers who would also want employment if the original cost of production were so enormously increased.