I think I have made out a case against the English hardware manufacturer, but when I have pointed these matters out to merchants and ironmongers, I have been met with various reasons for this manifest inferiority. I do not know how far these excuses may be valid, but one man says that the reason, as regards locks, is somewhat as follows: The locksmiths of the district wherein they are made in many cases work at their own homes; one man making one part of a lock, while other men make other parts. This goes on generation after generation, and the men become mere machines, not knowing how the entire lock is constructed, and not caring to know. Another attributes it to the influence of the trades-unions, and says that if a manufacturer wants a different kind of lock, the price for the work is immediately put higher, even though the actual labor may not be increased. A third says it is due to the drunkenness of the hands, and their consequent poverty and physical and social demoralization, which prevents them from rising to such an intellectual level as will enable them to see the evils of their system, and adopt the right means to remove them. A fourth boldly says, "We make these goods because our customers want them." How far the reasons assigned by the first three are correct I am unable to say, but for the fourth, the extent to which the builders of England have patronized the Americans is a complete answer. This defense, "Our customers want them," is as old as the hills, and has been used to cover every kind of deception and inferior article ever manufactured. Our Lancashire manufacturers use it when they are charged with sending china clay and mildew (and call it calico) for the mild Hindoo and the Heathen Chinee to dress themselves in. Our butter merchants use it when they make up grease and call it butter; and our hardware merchants use it when they send us sham locks, and call them brass bushed, etc. It is the duty of the manufacturer to invent for his customers, and it is preposterous to say that the builder would prefer that embodiment of fraud--the English rim-lock, which I showed to you--to the American lock, which, at any rate, was an honest article, especially when the latter had the great advantage of being considerably cheaper. I am afraid that the swindling and greed of our merchants is having the effect of thrusting us out of the markets of the world, including our home markets; and when it is too late, these men who are making the name of English goods a byword and a reproach, even among the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the untutored savages of the South Sea Islands, will find that "honesty is the best policy."