In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.” Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is pre-eminent. “She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them. Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too; for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted Mumbo-Jumbos they export. [Illustration: BULL RING. _From a Print after David Cox._] “Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and paste; buckles, sword-hilts, buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export; among them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that long cast a slur upon the town. Things coming from Birmingham were in those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the making of “silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from its nature “soft tommy.” A tale is told of the owner of the factory where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear the pair of buckles he was making. “Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?” “Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to curse the man that made them, and so I thought I would be the first.” Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a copper kettle to a Birmingham manufacturing jeweller he would turn you out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!