◆¹ We will therefore content ourselves with comparing the labourers of to-day with the labourers of the days of Pitt; and with regard to those two sets of men, we may safely say this, that in whatever respect the latter seem able to do more than the former, their seemingly increased power can be definitely and distinctly traced to some source outside themselves, from which it has been taken and lent to them—in other words, to the ability of some one able man, or else to the joint action of a body of able men. A single illustration is sufficient to prove this. It consists of a fact to which I have alluded in general terms already. It is as follows:— [Sidenote ◆1 We shall see that in Labour itself there has been no progress whatsoever. Ability has been the sole progressive agent.] When Watt had perfected his steam-engine in structure, design, and principle, and was able to make a model which was triumphantly successful in its working, he encountered an obstacle of which few people are aware, and which, had it not been overcome, would have made the development of steam-power, as we know it now, an utter impossibility. It was indeed, in the opinion of the engineer Smeaton, fatal to the success of Watt’s steam-engine altogether. This obstacle was the difficulty of making cylinders, of any useful size, sufficiently true to keep the pistons steam-tight. Watt, with indomitable perseverance, endeavoured to train men to the degree of accuracy required, by setting them to work at cylinders, and at nothing else; and by inducing fathers to bring up their sons with them in the workshop, and thus from their earliest youth habituate them to this single task. By this means, in time, a band of labourers was secured in whom skill was raised to the highest point of which it is capable. ◆¹ But not even all the skill of those carefully-trained men—men trained by the greatest mechanical genius of the modern world—was equal to making cylinders approaching the standard of accuracy which was necessary to render the steam-engine, as we now know it, a possibility. But what the Labour of the cleverest labourer could never be brought to accomplish, was instantly and with ease accomplished by the action of Ability. Henry Maudslay, by introducing the slide-rest, did at a single stroke for all the mechanics in the country what Watt, after years of effort, was unable to do for any of them. The Ability of Maudslay, congealed in this beautiful instrument, took the tool out of the hands of Labour at the turning-lathe, and held it to the surface of the cylinder, whilst Labour looked on and watched. With this iron “mate” lent to him,—this child of an alien brain,—the average mechanic was enabled to accomplish wonders which no mechanic in the world by his own skill could approach. The power of one man descended at once on a thousand workshops, and sat on each of the labourers like the fire of