Verbally, this was the English Admiralty standard for mild steel plates and shapes. But the English had an elastic system of inspection which left much to be determined by the judgment and knowledge of the inspector. The system adopted by our earlier inspectors of material was rigid as a rock and inelastic as cast-iron. The letter of the law, not the spirit of it, was their guide. These requirements and the mode of enforcing them would have been drastic had the mild-steel industry been in a flourishing condition. But as a matter of fact it had not been developed at all in this country; so they were formulating crucial requirements for the product of an industry which did not exist. The production of mild steel, or at least its use in naval construction, was still in the experimental stage then, even in England, its native home. The “Iris” and “Mercury,” the first all-steel ships built in England, had not been in commission more than two years, when the requirements for our new ships were formulated by the naval authorities and embodied in an Act of Congress. Bessemer steel was produced in large quantities here at the time for making rails and tank-plates. But Bessemer could not stand the navy tests. Nothing but open-hearth steel could do it, and at the time when bids were asked for the first four ships there was not an open-hearth mill in the country that could make the ingots required for the plates and shapes of the sizes and qualities demanded. Still, American steel-makers were found willing to undertake the task, though the sequel soon proved that their conceptions of what confronted them were quite vague. When one surveys the open-hearth steel industry as it exists in the United States to-day (1901), largely exceeding that of Great Britain, and greater than that of all the rest of the world, exclusive of the United Kingdom, put together, it seems impossible to realize that it is all the growth of a score of years. As late as 1887 there was no forging-mill in this country that could forge a three-throw crank-shaft in one piece, and the “Baltimore’s” crank-shafts of that description had to be imported from Whitworth’s works in England.