The beginnings of the iron industry in America were none too early. There came a need for them very soon after they had extended into other parts of New England, and into New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1775, there were a large number of small furnaces and foundries. But coal and iron, the two earth-born servants of national progress which are now always twins, were not then coupled. The first of them was out of consideration. The early iron men looked for water-falls instead, and for the wood of the primeval forest. [Footnote: It is now easy to learn that a coal-mine may be a more valuable possession than a gold-mine, and that iron is better as an industry than silver. There are mountains of iron in Mexico, but no coal, and silver-mines so rich that silver, smelted with expensive wood fuel, is the staple product of the country. Yet the people are among the poorest in Christendom. There is a ceaseless iron-famine, so that the chiefest form of railway robbery is the stealing of the links and pins from trains. There are almost no metal industries. A barbaric agriculture prevails for the want of material for the making of tools. The actual means of progress are not at hand, notwithstanding the product of silver, which goes by weight as a commodity to purchase most that the country needs.] They became very necessary to the country in 1755--when the "French" war came, and they then began the making of the shot and guns used in that struggle, and became accustomed to the manufacture in time for the Revolution. Looking back for causes conducive to momentous results, we may here find one not usually considered in the histories. But for the advancement of the iron industry in America, great for the time and circumstances, independence could not have been won, and even the _feeling_ and desire of independence would have been indefinitely delayed. The industry was slow, painful, and uncertain, only because the mechanic arts were pursued only to an extent possible with the skill and muscular energy of men. There were none of the wonderful automatic mechanisms that we know as machine-tools. There was only the almost unaided human arm with which to subdue the boundless savagery of a continent, and win independence and form a nation besides. The demand for huge masses of the most essential of the factors of civilization has grown since, because the ironclad and the big gun have come, and those inadequate forces and crude methods supplied for a time the demand that was small and imperative. The largest mass made then, and frequently spoken of in colonial records, was a piece called a "sow;" spelled then "sowe." It was a long, triangular mass, cast by being run into a trench made in sand. [Footnote: When, later, little side-trenches were made beside the first, with little channels to carry the metal into them, the smaller castings were naturally called "pigges." Hence our "pig-iron."] [Illustration: MAKING A TRENCH TO CAST A "SOWE."]