In all mining operations, conducted as they are in modern times, and in our own country, we must either go without the article produced, whether coal, or iron, or lead, or copper, if the machines were abolished,—or we must employ human labour, in works the most painful, at a price which would not only render existence unbearable, but destroy it altogether. The people, in that case, would be in the condition of the unhappy natives of South America, when the Spaniards resolved to get gold at any cost of human suffering. The Spaniards had no machines but pickaxes and spades to put in the hands of the poor Indians. They compelled them to labour incessantly with these, and half the people were destroyed. Without machinery, in places where people can obtain even valuable ore for nothing, the collection and preparation of metals is hardly worth the labour. Mungo [Park] describes the sad condition of the Africans who are always washing gold-dust;—and we have seen in Derbyshire a poor man separating small particles of lead from the limestone, or spar, of that country, and unable to earn a shilling a day by the process. A man of capital erects lead-works, and in a year or two obtains an adequate profit, and employs many labourers.
It may enable us, in addition to our slight notices of quantities produced, to form something like an accurate conception of the vast mineral industry of this country, if we give the aggregate of men employed as miners and metal-workers, according to the census of 1851. Of coal-miners there were 216,366; of iron-miners, 27,098; of copper-miners, 18,468; of tin-miners, 12,912; of lead-miners, 21,617. This is a total of 296,461. In the manufacture of various articles of iron and steel, in addition to the iron and coal miners, who cannot be accurately distinguished, there are employed 281,578 male workers, and 18,807 female; and in the manufacture of articles of brass and other mixed metals, 46,076; of which number 8370 are females. The workers in metal thus enumerated amount to 542,922. We may add, from the class of persons engaged in mechanic productions, in which we find 48,050 engine and machine makers, and 7429 gunsmiths, a number that will raise the aggregate of miners and workers in metals to 600,000 persons. The boldness of some of the operations which are conducted in this department of industry, the various skill of the labourers, and the vastness of the aggregate results, impress the mind with a sense of power that almost belongs to the sublime. The fables of mythology are tame when compared with these realities of science. Vulcan, with his anvils in Ætna, is a feeble instrument by the side of the steam-hammer that forges an anchor, or the hydraulic press that lifts a bridge. A knot of Cupids co-operating for the fabrication of their barbed arrows is the poetry of painting applied to the arts. But there is higher poetry in that triumph of knowledge, and skill, and union of forces, which fills a furnace with fifty thousand pounds of molten iron, and conducts the red-hot stream to the enormous mould which is to produce a cylinder without a flaw.
Cupids forging arrows. From Albani
Coal-Railway from South Hetton to Seaham Harbour, with the ascending and descending Trains.
[20] See a table by Professor Ansted in the Great Exhibition Catalogue, vol. i. p. 181.