and it now only remains for them to fit themselves and their families for a rational use and enjoyment of the fruits of their toil. In looking back over the sad and gloomy fields of suffering among the European mines and works which I have traversed so often, and in looking forward to the more cheerful prospect now spread out before the sons of toil, I am tempted to exclaim with the patriarch: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation."
But cheap iron is a blessing to mankind, and to deprive the world of it is a calamity so serious that no one can contemplate it without a feeling of reluctance. Here, again, science steps in to reconcile high wages with cheap iron. It is the mission of science to cheapen processes, which enables wages to be raised without enhancing the cost of the product of the world. The history of industry is full of examples of the truth of this proposition, but for our purpose the Bessemer process affords its best illustration. By the genius of one man the whole world is enriched, its comforts enlarged, its progress promoted, and new fields of art and industry opened to its enterprise and energy. The annual saving in carrying on the business and transportation of the world can only be measured by millions; and when equal genius is applied to the proper distribution of the savings produced by the Bessemer process, by the Danks puddler, and other economical processes that have been and will be invented, the laboring classes all over the world will be lifted out of the depths, and this earth become the paradise it was intended to be, when the Great Giver of all endowed it with so much beauty and such boundless sources of wealth, and made the forces of Nature to be the servants of man, whenever he learns how to use and govern them. You, gentlemen, have limited yourselves to the study of physical laws and their application to industry, but I hope to see the day when all over this land, and throughout the world, there will be similar associations devoting themselves with equal zeal and intelligence to the discovery of the laws upon which society should be organized, and to the application of these laws to the proper distribution of the fruits of industry among those who labor for their production; so that nowhere in the world, and least of all in this land of boundless resources, shall it be said that there are idle hands because there is no work to be done, or that there are want and misery because there is not a just division of the proceeds of industry. If then, my views in regard to the dignity and importance of your mission be correct, you have not associated yourselves together one day too soon. You can derive encouragement from the magnificent results already achieved by your sister association, the British Iron and Steel Institute, only two years your senior, which has already given to the world several volumes of papers of inestimable value, and among them that admirable treatise of J. Lowthian Bell, on "the Chemical Phenomena of Iron Smelting," wherein the laws covering the operation of
