Not only the modern spirit is here, even in eminence, which dares great effort for great advantage; but the chiefest of modern instruments is here, which is the ancient untractable iron, transfigured into steel. It was a sign, and even a measure, of ancient degeneracy, when the age of Gold was followed if not forgotten by one of Iron. Decadence of arts, of learning and laws, of society itself, was implied in the fact. The more intrepid intelligence, the more versatile energy, amid which we live, have achieved the success of combining the two: so that while it is true now, as of old, that "no mattock plunges a golden edge into the ground, and no nail drives a silver point into the plank," it is also true that, under the stimulus of the larger expenditure which the added supplies of gold make possible, the duller metal has taken a fineness, a brightness and hardness, with a tensile strength, before unfamiliar. The iron, as of old, quarries the gold, and cuts it out from river-bed and from rock. But, under the alchemy which gold applies, the iron takes nobler properties upon it. Converted into steel, in masses that would lately have staggered men's thoughts, it becomes the kingliest instrument of peoples for subduing the earth. Things dainty and things mighty are fashioned from it in equal abundance:--gun-carriage and cannon, with the solid platforms on which they rest; the largest castings, and heaviest plates, as well as wheel, axle, and rail, as well as screw or file or saw. It is shaped into the hulls of ships. It is built alike into column and truss, balcony, roof, and springing dome. To the loom and the press, and the boiler from whose fierce and untiring heart their force is supplied, it is equally apt; while, as drawn into delicate wires, it is coiled into springs, woven into gauze, sharpened into needles, twisted into ropes; it is made to yield music in all our homes; electric currents are sent upon it, along our streets, around the world; it enables us to talk with correspondents afar, or it is knit, as before our eyes, into the new and noble causeways of pleasure and of commerce. I hardly think that we yet appreciate the significance of this change which has passed upon iron. It is the industrial victory of the century, not to have heaped the extracted gold in higher piles, or to have crowded the bursting vaults with accumulated silver, but to have conferred, by the sovereign touch of scientific invention, flexibility, grace, variety of use, an almost ethereal and spiritual virtue, on the stubbornest of common metals. The indications of physical achievement in the future, thus inaugurated, outrun the compass of human thought.