when you stand thirty feet from the immense furnace,
whose flames have a temperature of more than a thousand degrees, you do
not guess its presence save when its great doors open to let out a steel
monster. And the monster is handled by only three or four workmen, who
now here, now there, open a tap causing immense cranes to move one way
or another by the pressure of water.

You enter these works expecting to hear the deafening noise of stampers,
and you find that there are no stampers. The immense hundred-ton guns
and the crank-shafts of transatlantic steamers are forged by hydraulic
pressure, and the worker has but to turn a tap to give shape to the
immense mass of steel, which makes a far more homogeneous metal, without
crack or flaw, of the blooms, whatever be their thickness.

I expected an infernal grating, and I saw machines which cut blocks of
steel thirty feet long with no more noise than is needed to cut cheese.
And when I expressed my admiration to the engineer who showed us round,
he answered--

"A mere question of economy! This machine, that planes steel, has been
in use for forty-two years. It would not have lasted ten years if its
parts, badly adjusted, 'interfered' and creaked at each movement of the
plane!

"And the blast-furnaces? It would be a waste to let heat escape instead
of utilizing it. Why roast the founders, when heat lost by radiation
represents tons of coal?

"The stampers that made buildings shake five leagues off were also
waste. Is it not better to forge by pressure than by impact, and it
costs less--there is less loss.

"In these works, light, cleanliness, the space allotted to each bench,
are but a simple question of economy. Work is better done when you can
see what you do, and have elbow-room.

"It is true," he said, "we were very cramped before coming here. Land
is so expensive in the vicinity of large towns--landlords are so
grasping!"

It is even so in mines. We know what mines are like nowadays from Zola's
descriptions and from newspaper reports. But the mine of the future will
be well ventilated, with a temperature as easily regulated as that of a
library; there will be no horses doomed to die below the earth:
underground traction will be carried on by means of an automatic cable
put into motion at the pit's mouth. Ventilators will be always working,
and there will never be explosions. This is no dream, such a mine is
already to be seen in England; I went down it. Here