are in fact a government industry.

"Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest north-east distance dawned Gibraltar, grand and gray--
Here and here did England help me, how can I help England, say?"

These are the words of Browning, and his question has well been
answered by the institution of the secret workshops and the secret
laboratory; as in most other cases England has helped herself, unless,
indeed, it should occur to the doctor that the poet was a Satanist, like
Pike, who himself was a poet, and had a chief finger in the pie.

Now the great historic rock is tunnelled by innumerable caverns, which,
our deponent witnesses, have never been explored by the tourist, and in
the most impracticable portions of the great subterranean maze,
whosoever has the audacity to penetrate will discover for himself the
existence of the industrial department of diabolism, but he must not
expect to come back unless he be a Sovereign Grand Master _ad vitam_,
and an initiate of Lucifer. The doctor has explored these caverns, has
seen the factory in full working order, has exhaustively described the
way in, has returned from the gulf like Dante, and has given away the
whole mystery. Possessed of his key to the labyrinth the wayfaring man
shall not err therein, and it will, no doubt, be a new curiosity for the
more daring among Cook's tourists. The workshops are supplied with
mechanics by a simple expedient; hopeless specimens of English
malefactors, condemned to penal servitude for the term of their natural
life, are relegated to this region, a kind of grim humour characterising
the selection. The most hideous convicts are chosen, and those most
corresponding in outward appearance to the favourite devils of the
hierarchy, under whose names they pass in the workshops, where they
commonly communicate with each other in the language of Volapuk. The
reason given is that this language has been adopted by the Spoeleic
Rite, which I confess that I had not heard of previously, but I venture
to think that the doctor has concealed the true reason, and that Volapuk
has been thus chosen because it is a diabolical invention; a universal
language prevailed previously to the confusion of Babel, and the new
language is an irreligious attempt to produce _ordo ab chao_ by a return
to unity of speech.

The Toxicological Department is worked by a higher class of criminals,
as for example, absconding trustees