NAIL MAKING employs a large number of people both at Bromsgrove and in the neighbourhood of Stourbridge. In the former town and district there were, some sixty years ago, only five or six nail masters or factors, and not more than 400 or 500 persons engaged in the business, but it now furnishes occupation for ten times that number. Twenty-five years since the trade was in a prosperous state, but about this time, owing to the demand being good, an inferior article was made, with which the customers were dissatisfied; and the result of this state of things was the invention of a machine which, by singular ingenuity and application of mechanical skill, cuts every part of the nail at once out of a solid sheet of iron. The rapidity, ease, and cheapness with which nails were thus multiplied, of course caused a great change in the condition and prospects of the nail-making districts. The demand, however, still continues for many descriptions of the article which cannot be made, or so well made, by machine, and supplies a tolerable amount of employment. The French and Germans now successfully compete with us in the manufacture, and the export trade to America is decreasing in consequence of the prohibitory duty imposed by the government of that country. The nailors, as a class, are almost as destitute as the colliers of everything like intelligence, and this is chiefly owing to the early age at which the children work at the trade and are able to earn a livelihood for themselves. The truck system—by which the employer pays the wages of his workpeople, not in money, but in goods of his own providing, and at prices of his own fixing—is an evil of monstrous growth, which has greatly assisted in the degradation of the workpeople. Recently, however, many benevolent efforts have been made to provide them with education and to remedy the social evils which exist amongst them. Thirty or forty years ago there was a considerable linen trade carried on at Bromsgrove. A good deal of flax was once grown in this neighbourhood, and the manufacture by the hand loom was considerable, but the introduction of machinery superseded this mode of making, and enterprise and capital, necessary to the establishment of factories with the latest improvements in machinery, were wanting. Moreover Bromsgrove linens got into disrepute, because those of inferior make were sent here for bleaching and sold as of Bromsgrove manufacture. Bromsgrove itself has been much improved within the last twenty years. In the year 1846 an Act of Parliament was passed for paving, cleansing, draining, and improving the town, and for the better assessing and collecting the parochial rates.