iron, which, of course, quality for quality, and allowing for the relative distances of carriage, cannot rise higher than that at which foreign iron can be imported. The production of pig in France being now (1859) 856,151 tons . 141,054 It follows that the whole annual consumption reaches . 997,205 The production of wrought iron is 520,099 tons The two items together form a total of 1,552,238 tons; the quantity exported, though not indicated in the customs returns, ought to be exactly equal to that imported under acquits à caution, which, as results from the figures given above, is, for this year, at the rate of 51,906 tons of pig, and 33,480 tons of wrought iron, giving a total of 85,386 tons. Deducting this figure from the whole quantity employed, it follows that the annual interior consumption of France is now at the rate of 1,466,652 tons. Now England produces, or rather did produce before the present crisis in the trade, about four millions of tons per annum, of which 1,500,000 tons were exported, leaving 2,500,000 tons for the needs of the country. The whole real consumption of France does not, therefore, quite equal the weight exported by Great Britain, and it amounts to only three-fifths of the home wants of the latter. As the present proportion of population between the two countries is roughly as 6 to 5, it follows that the consumption per head in England is very nearly double that of France. The manufacturing and constructing parts of the iron-trade are carried on in France with great success and perfection. The more difficult classes of wrought iron are made with singular cheapness as compared with England: plates, for instance, sell in Wales and at Newcastle at from 87. to 91. per ton up to 4 cwt. each, while in France they cost about 127.; but this difference disappears with augmentation of size and weight, and at 8 cwt. per plate the cost is nearly the same on both sides of the water, the French having scarcely any additions of price for extra sizes, as is the custom in England. The same conditions apply with equal force to angle and T iron, of which the heavier sizes are actually cheaper in France than in England; indeed, many of the sections now currently rolled in France are not known in this country, where they are considered too difficult: such are, for instance, the double I bars, 2 feet high and 16 feet long, made at Châtillon for 207. a ton. So far from hesitating before the difficulty of manufacture of these special types, French engineers are always seeking to create new ones, in order to suppress riveting and hand labour by single pieces rolled complete to the size and shape wanted. The reasons of this advanced state of all rolled work are, first, that the French forges certainly possess, on the whole, better and more powerful machinery than the English-their rolls and fly-wheels are particularly large; that they are always on the watch for new inventions and new means of production, feeling that with the high price of their raw VOL. L. 2 B material their prospect of success against foreign competition lies in the economies which they can introduce into their manufacture, properly so called; and, lastly, that their labour is cheaper than in England or Belgium. The latter point is a very important one. The English workman is paid more than the Frenchman, and though he is more of a machine than the other, and will spend his whole life in making the same object, so attaining great dexterity and producing work at the lowest cost, while the Frenchman requires change, and aspires after promotion, still, the intelligence and quickness of the latter, added to the real economy of pay, gives a decided money advantage to France. Even as compared with the Belgians, whose wages are lower still, the French bring out their work cheaper. The Compagnie Générale des Matériels de Chemins de Fer, which has establishments at Paris and Brussels, finds that the same work costs less in France than in Belgium notwithstanding the difference of the price of labour. The same economy of manufacture is found in engines, locomotives, bridges, and other metallic constructions. With iron always dearer than in England or Belgium-for even allowing for the advantages of the system of temporary free admission, there is always the extra carriage to pay-the French makers can produce many sorts of work at nearly the same average prices as the English, and indeed on certain products can almost beat them. By far the greater part of the bridges, station-roofs, and locomotives which have been supplied to the railways of Europe during the last six years have been made in France; rails alone continue to be taken from England. This fact is partly explainable by the cir cumstance that the majority of the railways recently got up in continental Europe have been promoted by Frenchmen, with French capital, and with French engineers, who have naturally given their orders in preference to their own country, but it has arisen also from the indisputable manufacturing talent and rapid progress of the French makers. Rails, which are almost raw iron, cost at this moment about 27. 10s. less in England than in France, but directly the metal is converted into a construction of any kind, the difference of first price begins to disappear; the greater the labour employed, the more the raw material is worked, the quicker do the French pull up their disadvantage at starting, and without exaggerating the advance which they have effected during the last ten years so much as to say that they can yet generally compete with England for railway plant or metallic constructions, it may be said with certainty that they are already almost able to hold their own, and that in a few years more they will probably become serious rivals to the English makers. This is rendered more likely still by the astonishingly low rates at which the Germans are now taking orders for locomotives and bridges; they have been twenty per cent. under both English and French for several recent contracts, and in their own defence the latter will do their best to still further bring down their prices. In the manufacture of spinning and weaving machinery, however, the French are still backward and dear. The French forge work, also, is very far advanced. The engineers of their navy, who have opportunities of comparing the heavy forgings of the two countries, declare positively that they are ahead of England in machinery, workmanship, and economy. Iron work for railway carriages, which is a growing branch of the trade, is produced in the Ardennes, where special works have been put up to make it, at prices which now average 26s. per cwt. all round, which, for such light pieces as the French use, is under the English rates, notwithstanding the extra cost of iron. The production of steel has risen most rapidly. In 1826, the total make amounted to 4757 tons; in 1852, the latest date to which official quantities are published, it reached 13,746 tons, of which 3938 tons were forge steel, and 9808 tons cemented steel. Since 1852 the production has again immensely increased: M. Petin, of Rive de Gier, told the tariff committee that he alone now makes 6000 tons of steel a year, and that he estimates the present annual yield of France at 50,000 tons. The latter figure seems high, but M. Petin's opinion has great weight, and it is confirmed by the numerous new applications for which steel has been used in France during the last four or five years. Not only is it employed for tires, axles, cylinders, and other heavy parts of machinery, but M. Petin is now manufacturing railway wheels entirely of cast steel, and in one piece. The mean wholesale prices of forge steel have fallen, since 1847, from 331. 7s. 6d. per ton to 281.; cemented and cast steel remaining nearly unchanged, the former at about 247., and the latter at about 60%. Not only has the production of steel increased in the large proportions indicated, but it is now manufactured almost exclusively with French iron, less than 5 per cent. of the whole being made with Swedish iron. The ore which gives the French steel comes from Corsica, the Pyrenees, the Dauphiné, Perigord and Savoy; much of it produces natural steel. All of it is smelted with charcoal. The quality of the French steel is good: it is even alleged that their steel plates for covering ships of war perfectly resisted cannon-balls during the experiments made on them at Vincennes, while English plates brought over to test against them broke in the trial. But, notwithstanding the excellence of the quality, some of the Paris cutlers still continue to use Sheffield steel for fine work: the importations of the latter is now at the rate of 2650 tons per annum, of which about fivesixths come in under drawback. The new tariff has increased this importation by a fifth, the duty on bar steel being reduced from 147. 8s. to 61. Of the minor branches of the iron-trade some progress but slowly; while others have attained considerable development during the last few years. The make of iron wire is estimated at 40,000 tons per annum : such of it as is manufactured with charcoal iron is of the very best quality, as, indeed, it needs to be to withstand the tests to which it is subjected by the administration of the telegraphs, who are its largest consumers. The production of tin plate (fer-blanc) is 10,000 tons against 70,000 tons in England: in this item the French are a long way behind. In the manufacture of pins and needles, also, France is not at all advanced; here their great competitors are not the English, but the Germans; the importation amounts to 750,000,000 needles per annum, of which only one-fifth come from England, and four-fifths from Germany. The tendency to employ iron for new applications is very marked. The use of double I girders for house floorings has not only become universal in Paris during the last six or seven years, but is spreading in the provinces in every direction. In Paris alone the consumption of iron, for building purposes, rose from 9995 tons of wrought iron and 9105 tons of castings in 1859, to 18,153 tons of wrought iron and 12,289 tons of castings in 1860. These various details of the recent progress of the trade are remarkably instructive; they show how the innate intelligence and aptitude of the French have enabled them not only to create a totally new industry, but to carry it almost to perfection in forty years, in the face of all sorts of difficulties. With a raw material which, when coal is included, costs them far more than it does their neighbours, they have managed, by skill and good administration, to convert it into manufactured articles, at prices which nearly regain the difference of first cost. This economy of handling is a better protection for them than all the duties imposed on foreign importations; and though, in order to prevent the destruction of the trade, the latter will long be necessary on pig and on the simpler forms of bar iron, which, from the price of coal and the long distances of carriage, the French can scarcely hope to ever produce as cheaply as in England, it is probable that before long they will be in a position to sell the higher classes of wrought iron, and also machinery, without any fiscal protection at all, especially if allowance is made for the exactness and admirable finish of their work. With the tariff, as it now stands, England can scarcely sell at all in France, and if hereafter, by a further reduction of duties, the introduction of foreign iron should become possible on a large scale (to permit which it must be supposed that French prices do not continue to fall), it will rather be the Belgians than the English who will get command of the market. Their prices are generally rather dearer than those of England, excepting for difficult forms, which, as in France, they produce with scarcely any augmentations of rate, and the quality of their metal is inferior, but they have the immense advantage of being able to execute the smallest orders immediately by railway, and of working to French weights, measures, and money, while the English, on the contrary, can only deliver in complete cargoes and roll to their own scales, which do not correspond with those of France. COURT OF PRUSSIA.* M. DE STERNBERG constitutes, with Prince Pückler Muskau and Countess Hahn-Hahn, a class apart in German literature. The success of certain of his novels has given him celebrity, all of them bearing the internal evidence of aristocratic feelings and a perfume of the ancient régime. In the presence of the democratic literature that is daily gaining the ascendancy in Germany, as in our own country, M. de Sternberg belongs almost to bygone ages. As a Russian gentleman, involved in the intricacies of German literature, he naturally sought for a home in the world of salons, and it is to this circumstance that we are indebted for his "Souvenirs," which have led many to regret that, where there was so much art, there was not also more discretion. But such was never the author's forte. When reproached with not belonging to the times he lived in, his only reply would be some new epigrammatic literary success; and, as to the world of the salons, he never considered it as a world of privacy in any shape whatsoever. Yet M. de Sternberg, although described by some, from their aristocratic antipathies, as belonging to a past order of things, himself repudiated the works of Goethe and Schiller as worn-out topics. Author, man of the world, and a man of fashion, he took more delight in the author of "Semilasso" and of " The Letters of a Dead Man." Prince Pückler Muskau, in his quality of "grand seigneur," takes, indeed, the first place in these Memoirs. The glory of the prince ranks side by side with that of the "Pelham" of Bulwer. His was the great epoch of Dandyism. Casanova and Byron turned all heads. The "beau" D'Orsay had succeeded to Beau Brummel. M. de Sternberg belonged to the same school. "My business and my art are to live," said Montaigne. Prince Pückler Muskau took up the theory in its most serious aspect, and to show that he knew how to live, he had mistresses that he posted up, horses that he ran, and duels that attracted attention even in London and Paris. Travel usually forms the heart and the mind. Prince Pückler Muskau wandered about the world in the character of a worn-out sceptical and mocking spirit, indifferent to everything, travelling for mere travelling's sake. Hence his affected horror of anything that appears to be a preconceived plan, his careless and pretentious style, and his sublime contempt for all the great interests of life, which he only touches, as it were, with the tips of his lips, and with that air of satiety with which an over-fed man crumbles a biscuit on the tablecloth; but all this does not prevent him coquetting with liberal ideas, at the very time that it is manifest that he does not believe in them, and that he frequently avers that the greatest epochs in history are those when despotism and slavery were triumphant. A cunning, blasé, used-up epicurean, he only loved the world so far as it contributed to his pleasures, and he is himself only worth the times that he lived in. After having sacrificed all social position in England, he Erinnerungsblätter von A. von Sternberg. Six vols. Leipzig: 1859. Les Salons de Vienne et de Berlin. Par l'Auteur "Des Hommes du Jour." Paris: 1861. |