Over the Ocean; or, Sights and Scenes in Foreign Lands

by Curtis Guild

From the glories of York Minster, from the pleasant and dreamy walks on delightful spring days, upon its old walls, and beneath its antique gateways, its ruined cloisters of St. Leonard's, founded by Athelstane the Saxon, and the stately ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, with the old Norman arch and shattered walls, we will glance at an English city under a cloud, or, I might almost say, under a pall, for the great black banner that hangs over Sheffield is almost dark enough for one, and in that respect reminds us of our own Pittsburg, with the everlasting coal smoke permeating and penetrating everywhere and everything.

The streets of Sheffield have the usual grimy, smoky appearance of a manufacturing place, and, apart from the steel and cutlery works, there is but little of interest here. One cannot help observing, however, the more abject squalor and misery which appear in some of the poorer neighborhoods, than is ever seen in similar towns or cities in America. The spirit shops, with their bold signs of different kinds of liquors, and the gin saloons, with their great painted casks reared on high behind the counter, at which women serve out the blue ruin, are visible explanations of the cause of no small portion of the misery.

I found the cutlery works that I visited conducted far differently than we manage such things in America, where the whole work would be carried on in one great factory, and from year to year improvements made in machinery, interior arrangements, &c.; but here the effort seems to be, on the part of the workmen, to resist every advance or improvement possible.

We visited the great show-rooms of Rogers & Sons, where specimens of every description of knives, razors, scissors, cork-screws, boot-hooks, &c., that they manufacture, were exhibited, a very museum of steel work; and a young salesman was detailed to answer the questions and show the same, including the celebrated many-bladed knife, which has one blade added for every year.

A visit to Joseph Elliot & Son's razor works revealed to us the manner in which many of the manufacturers carry on their business. We found the workmen not all together in one factory, but in different buildings. In one was where the first rough process of forging was performed; from thence, perhaps across a street, the blades received further touches from other workmen, and so on, till, when ready for grinding and polishing, they were carried to the grinding and polishing works, some distance off, and finally returned to a building near the warerooms, to be joined to the handles, after which they were papered and packed, immediately adjoining the warerooms proper, where sales were made and goods delivered.

I was surprised, in visiting the forges where the elastic metal was beat into graceful blades, to find them little dingy nooks and corners in a series of old rookeries of buildings, often badly lighted, cramped and inconvenient, and difficult of access. No American workmen would work in such a place; but in watching the progress of the work, we saw instances of the skill and thoroughness of British mechanics, who have devoted their life to one particular branch of manufacture—the precision of stroke in forging, the rapidity with which it was done, to say nothing of the reliability, which is one characteristic of English work.

In that country, where the ranks of every department of labor are so crowded, there seems to be an ambition as to who shall do the best work, who shall be he that turns out the most skilfully wrought article; and of course the incentive to this ambition is a permanent situation, and a workman whom the master will be the last to part with in dull times. Then, again, in the battle for life, for absolute bread and butter, people are only too glad to make a sacrifice to learn a trade that will provide it. No boy can set up as a journeyman here after a couple of years' experience, as they do in America. There are no such bunglers in every department of mechanical work as in our country. To do journeyman's work and earn journeyman's pay, a man must have served a regular apprenticeship, and have learned his business; and he has to pay his master for giving him the opportunity, and teaching him a trade, by which he can work and receive a journeyman's pay—which is right and proper. The compensation may be in the advantage the master gets from good work at a low figure in the last years of the apprenticeship, or in some kinds of business in a stipulated sum of money paid to him. Yet in England he gets some return, instead of having his workman, as is generally the case in America, as soon as he ceases to spoil material and becomes of some value, desert him sans cérémonie.

The difficulty, in America, lies in the enormous demand for mechanical labor, so large that many are willing and obliged to receive inferior work or none at all, in the haste that all have to be rich, the boy to have journeyman's wages, the journeyman to be foreman, and foreman to be contractor and manager, and the abundant opportunity for them all to be so with the very smallest qualifications for the positions.

It is the thorough workmanship of many varieties of British goods that makes them so much superior to those of American manufacture; and we may talk in this country as much as we please about its being snobbish to prefer foreign to American manufactured goods, yet just as long as the American article is inferior in quality, durability, and finish to the foreign article, just so long will people of means and education purchase it. I believe in encouraging American manufactures to their fullest extent; but let American manufacturers, when they are encouraged by protection or whatever means, prove by their products that they are deserving it, as it is gratifying to know that many of them have; and in this very article of steel, the great Pittsburg steel workers, such as Park Bros. & Co., Hussey, Wells, & Co., Anderson, Cook, & Co., and others in that city and Philadelphia, whose names do not now occur to me, have actually, in some departments of their business, beaten the British manufacturers in excellence and finish, proving that it can be done in America. When visiting the great iron works, forges, and factories in Pittsburg, I have frequently encountered, in the different departments, skilled workmen from Birmingham, Sheffield, and other English manufacturing towns, who, of course, were doing much better than at home, and whose thorough knowledge of their trade never failed to be the burden of the managers' commendation.

A razor is beaten out into shape, ground, tempered, polished, and finished much more speedily than I imagined; and as an illustration of the cheapness at which one can be produced, very good ones are made by Rogers & Sons for six shillings a dozen, or sixpence each. This can be done because they are made by apprentices, whose wages are comparatively trifling. A very large number of these razors go to the United States. Rogers' knives and razors of the finer descriptions generally command a slight advance over those of other manufacturers, although there are some here even in Sheffield whose work is equally good in every respect.