There is no more interesting industrial establishment in the West than the plate-glass works at Crystal City, thirty miles south on the river. It was built up after repeated failures and reverses—for the business, like any other, had to be learned. The plant is very extensive, the buildings are of the best, the machinery is that most approved, and the whole represents a cash investment of $1,500,000. The location of the works at this point was determined by the existence of a mountain of sand which is quarried out like rock, and is the finest and cleanest silica known in the country. The production is confined entirety to plate-glass, which is cast in great slabs, twelve feet by twelve and a half in size, each of which weighs, before it is reduced half in thickness by grinding, smoothing, and polishing, about 750 pounds. The product for 1887 was 1,200,000 feet. The coal used in the furnaces is converted into gas, which is found to be the most economical and most easily regulated fuel. This industry has drawn together a population of about 1500. I was interested to learn that labor in the production of this glass is paid twice as much as similar labor in England, and from three to four times as much as similar labor in France and Belgium. As the materials used in making plate-glass are inexpensive, the main cost, after the plant, is in labor. Since plate-glass was first made in this country, eighteen years ago, the price of it in the foreign market has been continually forced down, until now it costs the American consumer only half what it cost him before, and the jobber gets it at an average cost of 75 cents a foot, as against the $1.50 a foot which we paid the foreign manufacturer before the establishment of American factories. And in these eighteen years the Government has had from this source a revenue of over seventeen millions, at an average duty, on all sizes, of less than 59 per cent.