"When you live on a marsh where the tide may suddenly rise house-high
without warning, if you are a wise man, you will keep a boat always
moored at the door."
"I certainly will," responded I, with energy.
"Very well. Every nation lives on that marsh which is called War.
While war is possible,--that is to say, in any year this side of the
Millennium,--there is but one sure means of safety, and that is actual
independence. At this moment England is the most striking illustration
of this truth. She is the most instructive warning to us, because she is
the least independent and the most hated nation in the world. England
and France and the United States are the three great maritime powers. We
all know how much love is lost just now between England and ourselves.
How is it with her ancient enemy across the Channel? The answer is
contained in the reported remark of Louis Napoleon: 'Why do the English
try to provoke a war with me? They know, if I should declare war against
England, that there is not an old woman in France who would not sell her
last shift to furnish me with means to carry it on.' Great Britain is at
this moment under the most enormous bonds to keep the peace. They are
the bonds of vital dependence upon the rest of the world.--Shall I
stop?" asked my watch.
"No, no; lose no time; go regularly on," answered I.
"Very well; while England sneers and rages at us, let us be warned by
her. She lives by her looms; but her looms and her laborers are fed from
abroad. Therefore she lies at the mercy of her enemies, and she takes
care never to make friends. She snarls and shows her teeth at us. She
sees us desperately fighting, and yet she can neither spring nor bite.
It is the moment most favorable for her to strike, but she cannot
improve it. She hopes and prays for the ruin of our government, seeing,
that, if it falls from internal disease, and not from a foreign blow,
her most threatening political and commercial rival is overthrown. And
she does not shrink from those hopes and prayers, although she knows
that the result she so ardently desires will be the establishment by
military power of a huge slave-empire, a counter-civilization to that
of Christianity. Fear of her life makes England false and timid. Her
dependence upon other nations has compelled her to abdicate her position
as the head of Saxon civilization, which is the gradual enlarging of
liberty as the only permanent security of universal international
prosperity and peace. Indeed, it is not denied that the tone of British
opinion in regard to human slavery is radically changed. That change is
the measure of the timidity and sophistication, the moral deterioration
inevitably produced in any people by the consciousness of its dependence
for the means of labor and life upon other nations. The crack of the
plantation-whip scares Washington no longer, but it pierces the heart of
Westminster with terror.
"See how utterly mean and mortifying is her attitude toward us. John
Bull looks across the highway of the world into his neighbor's house.
'D' ye see,' he mutters, 'that man chastising his son in his house
yonder? Let's play that they are not related, and ask him what he means
by assaulting an innocent passenger.' Then he turns to the rest of the
people in the street, who know exactly how virtuous and mild John Bull
is in his own family-relations, who have watched his tender forbearance
with his eldest son Erin, and his long-suffering suavity with his
youngest son India, and says to them,--'To a moral citizen of the world
it is very shocking to see such an insolent attack upon a peaceable
person. That man is an intolerable bully. If he were smaller, I'd step
over and kick him.'--Do you feel drowsy?" asked my watch.
"I was never more awake," I answered; "but you seem to me,--although,
when I look at you and think of Waltham, it is the most natural thing in
the world,--yet you do seem hard upon Old England, Mother England, spite
of all."
"Ah!" ticked my American watch, "not even I would for a moment seem to
be unjust to all that is manly and noble and friendly in England and
among Englishmen. There are two nations there, as Disraeli had already
said in one sense, when Gasparin said it in another. There is the sound
old stock from which flowers the finest modern civilization. From that
come the sweetness, the candor, the perception and sympathy of men like
Mill and Cairnes and Bright. From that springs all the nobler thought
of England. It is to that thought, to that spirit of lofty humanity
and pure justice, that Garibaldi appeals in his address to the English
people from his prison,--an appeal which seems utterly ludicrous, if
you think of it as addressed to the historic John Bull, but which is
perfectly intelligible and appropriate, if you remember that Sir Philip
Sidney was an Englishman as well as George IV., and that John Stuart
Mill is no less English than Lord Palmerston or Russell. It is with that
spirit that American civilization is truly harmonious. But there is the
other, merely trading, short-sighted, selfish spirit, which is typified
by the coarse John Bull of the pictures, and which has touched almost to
a frenzy of despair Carlyle in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets" and Tennyson
in "Maud." That is the dominant England of the hour. That is the England
which lives at the mercy of rivals. And that is the England which,
consequently, with feverish haste, proclaims equal belligerence between
the leaders of an insurrection for the extension and fortification of
slavery and the nation which defends its existence against them. That
is the England whose prime-minister alleges that a friendly power has
authorized an insult, while at the very moment in which he speaks he
carries in his pocket the express disclaimer of that power. That is
the England which incessantly taunts and reviles and belies a kindred
people, whose sole fault is that they were too slow to believe their
brothers parricides, and who were credulous enough to suppose that
England loved not only the profit, but the principle, of Liberty under
Law."
"It is very sad; but it certainly seems so," said I.
"Seems, my dear friend? nay, it is," ticked my watch, persistently. "It
is the inevitable penalty of national deterioration which any people
must pay that in its haste to be rich forgets to secure its actual
independence. Thus Richard Cobden, the most sagacious of English
statesmen, is the most unflinching apostle of peace, because he knows
that England has put it out of her power to go to war. I saw you reading
his late argument against a blockade. Did you reflect that it was really
an argument against war? 'How absurd,' he cries, 'that a commercial
nation, which lives by imports and exports, paying for the one by the
other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell,
cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!' 'In a commercial
nation,' says the orator, 'the system of blockade is mere suicide.'
"But a blockade may be clearly as effective a means of warfare as a
cannonade. If you can cut off your enemy from all that he gives and all
that he gets from without, you have taken the first great step in war.
Unless he can supply himself, he must presently surrender or perish. For
war is brute force. It is a process of terrible compulsion. 'Do this,'
says War, 'or you shall burn, and starve, and hunger, and be shot, and
die.'
"The point to be settled between the two combatants is, which can stand
starving and shooting longest. If one of them depends for his food upon
the sale to others of what he makes, and depends for what he makes upon
what he can get from others, it is easy enough to see, that, if the
other is self-supporting, his victory is sure, if he have only the means
to cut off supplies. England is at the mercy of a skilful and effective
blockade. No wonder her shrewdest statesman implores her to see it.
"'My dear John Bull,' says Cobden, 'an honorable member of your
Parliament, a miller and grain-merchant, estimates that the food
imported into England between September of last year and June of this
year was equal to the sustenance of between three and four millions of
people for a twelve-month; and his remark to me was, that, if that food
had not been brought from America, all the money in Lombard Street could
not have purchased it elsewhere, because elsewhere it did not exist.'
"That is the position of a nation with the hand of another upon its
throat.--Do I tire you?" ticked my watch.
"Not at all. I am listening intently, and trying to see what you are
coming to," I answered.
"We are coming, and very rapidly, to West Newton and the Waltham
Watch-Factory," ticked my companion.
"I hope so. It was where I understood you to invite me to go," said I.
"Courage, my friend! Before we get to the factory, let us understand the
reason of it. Let me finish showing you why I have a national pride in
my ancestral halls, and why I think that the American flag floats over
that building as appropriately as over Fort Adams or Monroe."
"I have always trusted you implicitly," I answered.
"Well, then, England is a nation whose mill grinds at the will of a
neighbor. Is it wonderful that so sagacious a statesman as Cobden says
that the blockade is a terrible thing for a commercial people? Take the
estimate of his authority, and imagine the supply of food from this
country into England stopped, and the bumptious little island necklaced
with Monitors to cut off the Continental supply. Do we not hold one of
her hands with our grain, and the other with our cotton? The grain she
gets, but the cotton is substantially stopped; what is the consequence?
Listen to Mr. Cobden. The case, he says, 'is so grave, so alarming,
and presents itself to those who reflect upon what may be the state of
things six months hence in such a hideous aspect, that it is apt to
beget thoughts of some violent remedy.' He computes that by Christmas
the Government must come to the aid of the pauper operatives, of whom
there are now seven hundred and fifty thousand, a number which will then
have increased to nearly a million.
"Of all nations, then, the industrial example of England is to be
avoided by every sensible people. She has been willing to wear chains,
because they were gold. But the pre-Millennial nations must be able to
stand alone; and we at this moment know more than ever that we must work
out our own national salvation, not only without aid, which we had no
reason to ask, but without sympathy, which we had every honorable right
to expect. But, to be a truly independent people, we must practically
prove our self-sufficiency; and at this moment patriotism shows itself
not only in defending the nation against the Rebellion, but in the
heartiest encouragement of every art and manufacture for which our
opportunities and capacities fit us."
My watch here ticked so loudly and defiantly that I feared some
neighboring passenger might have a Frodsham or Jurgensen in his pocket
and feel insulted.
"A nation like ours," steadily ticked my watch, "seated upon a continent
from sea to sea, with so propitious a variety of climate and with such
imperial resources of every kind, if it brought all its powers to bear
upon its productions and opportunities, would be absolutely invincible,
because entirely independent. It need not, therefore, sit a cynic
recluse on the Western sea. It need not, therefore, deny nor delay the
dawn of the Millennial day, which the poet beheld, when
'The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the
battle-flags were furled,
In the Parliament of man, the Federation
of the world.'
"Tick, tick, tick," urged my watch. But I made no reply.
"Why, then," it continued, "do we consent to look longer to Europe for
any of the essential conveniences of life? Why are our clothes not made
of American cloth or of American silk? Why are our railroads not laid
with American iron? Yes, and why,--pardon me, but we are very near
Waltham,--why is our time not told by American watches? Tea and coffee,
doubtless, we cannot grow, nor do lemons and bananas ripen in our sun.
But has not the time come when every hearty American will say, 'All that
I can get here which is good enough and cheap enough for the purpose,
I will not look for elsewhere; and all that I can do to develop every
resource and possibility, I will do with all my heart'?"
"I do not wish to dampen your enthusiasm," answered I, "but I remember
a story of that friend of Southern liberty and author of the
Fugitive-Slave Bill, Mason of Virginia. He appeared in the Senate during
the Secession winter, in a suit of Southern-made clothes. The wool was
grown and spun and woven in Virginia, and Mason wore it to show that
Virginia unassisted could clothe her children. But a shrewder man than
Mason quietly turned up the buttons on the Secession coat and showed
upon them the stamp of a Connecticut factory."
"Have you ever found me unreasonable?" ticked my friend. "Have you ever
seen even my hand tremble, as it pointed out to you so many hours in
which you have been earnestly interested? I am not excited even by my
own existence, and I claim nothing extravagant. There will always be
some things that we may not be able to make advantageously. Absolute
independence of the rest of the world is no more possible than
desirable. But everything which tends to increase instead of diminishing
a vital dependence is nationally dangerous. I think, if you will
consider me attentively, you will agree that I ought to know that trade
is everywhere controlled by positive laws; nor will any wise watch
expect them to be long or willingly disregarded by the most enthusiastic
patriotism. Knowing that, we do not need to go far to discover why so
many important conveniences are still made for us by foreign hands. The
immense and compact population of Europe compels a marvellous division
of labor, whereby the detail of work is more perfected, and it also
forces a low rate of wages, with which in a new country sparely peopled
like ours the manufacture of the same wares can scarcely compete. This
is the great practical difficulty; but it can be obviated in two ways.
If a people assume that the fostering of its own manufactures is a
cardinal necessity, it can secure that result either by the coarse
process of compulsory duties upon all foreign importations, or by
developing the ingenuity and skill which will so cheapen the manufacture
itself as to make up the difference of outlay in wages.
"Then, if the work is as well done and as cheaply furnished"----ticked
my watch, a little proudly and triumphantly.
"Then it needs only to be known, to be universally and heartily
welcomed," said I. "Patriotism and the laws of trade will coincide, and
there will be no excuse for depending longer upon the foreign supply."
"But the fact must be made known," ticked my watch, thoughtfully.
"It certainly must," I answered.
"Well, it _is_ a fact that a man can get a better watch more cheaply, if
he buys an American instead of a foreign one."
Friendship and gratitude inspired my reply.
"I will put my mouth to the 'Atlantic Trumpet,'--I mean 'Monthly,'--and
blow a blast."
"That is not necessary; but as we are very near the station at West
Newton where we leave the railroad, and as I have endeavored to show
you the national importance of doing everything for ourselves that we
reasonably can, you will probably interest your hearers more, if you
give them a little description of your visit to my birthplace. Excuse
me, but I have watched you pretty constantly for two years, and, if you
will be governed by me, as you have generally been during that time, you
will not undertake any very elaborate mechanical description, but say a
few words merely of what you are going to see."
This sensible advice was but another proof of the accuracy of my watch.
While it was yet ticking, the train stopped at West Newton, and we
stepped out upon the platform. The station nearest to the Watch-Factory
is that at Waltham upon the Fitchburg Railroad; but by taking the
Worcester cars to West Newton, you secure a pleasant drive of a mile or
two across the country. If you can also secure, as my watch took care to
do for me, the company of the resident manager of the factory, the drive
is entirely pleasant and the talk full of value.
We import about five millions of dollars' worth of watches every year,
mainly from England and Switzerland through France, and then pay about
as much more to get them to go. Of course inquisitive Yankee ingenuity
long ago asked the question, Why should we do it? If anything is to be
made, why should not we make it better than anybody in the world? The
answer was very evident,--because we could not compete with the skilled
and poorly paid labor of Europe. But during the last war with England
the question became as emphatic as it is now, and a practical answer was
given in the excellent watches made at Worcester in Massachusetts, and
at Hartford in Connecticut.
But these were merely prophetic protests. The best watches in use were
Swiss. Four-fifths of the work in making them was done by hand in
separate workshops, subject of course to the skill, temper, and
conscience of the workmen. The various parts of each were then sent in
to the finisher. Every watch was thus a separate and individual work.
There could be no absolute precision in the parts of different watches
even of the same general model; and only the best works of the best
finishers were the best watches. The purchase of a watch became almost
as uncertain as that of a horse, and many of the dealers might be called
watch-jockeys as justly as horse-dealers horse-jockeys.
A.L. Dennison, of Maine, seems to have been the first who conceived
American watch-making as a manufacture that could hold its own against
European competition. It was clear enough that to put raw and well-paid
American labor into the field against European skill and low wages, with
no other protection than four per cent., which was then the tariff, was
folly. But why not apply the same principle to making watches that Eli
Whitney applied to making fire-arms, and put machinery to do the work of
men, thereby saving wages and securing uniform excellence of work? There
was no reason whatever, provided you could make the machinery. Mr.
Dennison supplied the idea; who would supply the means of working it
out? He was an enthusiast, of course,--visionary, probably; for in all
inventors the imagination must be so powerful that it will sometimes
disturb the conditions essential to the practical experiment; but he
interested others until the necessary tools began to appear, and enough
capital being willing to try the chances, the experiment of making
American watches by machinery began in Roxbury in the year 1850. After
various fortunes, the manufacture passed from the original hands into
those of the present company, which is incorporated by the State of
Massachusetts.
"Do you think," whispered I to my watch, as I listened to these facts,
"that the experiment is still doubtful?"
My companion ticked so indignantly that my friend the manager evidently
suspected what question I had asked, and he answered at once,--
"The experiment is already perfectly successful. We have had our
critical moments, but"----
"But now," proudly ticked my watch, "now we have weathered the Cape Horn
of adversity and doubt, and ride secure upon the deep Pacific sea of
prosperity and certainty. You had better blow a note like that through
your Atlantic Bugle. Set your tune high, and play it up loud and
lively."
"It seems to me," answered I, "that the tune plays itself. There is no
need of puffing at the instrument."
While my watch was thus pleasantly jesting, we had passed through a low
pine wood and come out upon the banks of the Charles River. Just before
us, upon the very edge of a river-basin, was a low two-story building
full of windows, and beyond, over the trees, were spires. They were the
steeples of Waltham, and the many-windowed building was the factory of
the American Watch Company. It stands upon a private road opened by
the Company in a domain of about seventy acres belonging to them. The
building thus secures quiet and freedom from dust, which are essential
conditions of so delicate and exquisite a manufacture.
The counting-room, which you enter first, is cheerful and elegant. A new
building, which the Company is adding to the factory, will give them
part of the ampler room the manufacture now demands; and within the last
few months the Company has absorbed the machinery and labor of a rival
company at Nashua, which was formed of some of the graduate workmen of
Waltham, but which was not successful. Every room in the factory is full
of light. The benches of polished cherry, the length of all of them
together being about three-quarters of a mile, are ranged along the
sides of the rooms, from the windows in which the prospect is rural and
peaceful. There is a low hum, but no loud roar or jar in the building.
There is no unpleasant smell, and all the processes are so neat and
exquisite that an air of elegance pervades the whole.
The first impression, upon hearing that a watch is made by machinery,
is, that it must be rather coarse and clumsy. No machine so cunning as
the human hand, we are fond of saying. But, if you will look at this
gauge, for instance, and then at any of these dainty and delicate
machines upon the benches, miniature lathes of steel, and contrivances
which combine the skill of innumerable exquisite fingers upon single
points, you will feel at once, that, when the machinery itself is
so almost poetic and sensitive, the result of its work must be
correspondingly perfect.
My friend--not the watch, but the watchmaker--said quietly, "By your
leave," and, pulling a single hair from my head, touched it to a fine
gauge, which indicated exactly the thickness of the hair. It was a test
of the twenty-five hundredth part of an inch. But there are also gauges
graduated to the ten-thousandth part of an inch. Here is a workman
making screws. Can you just see them? That hardly visible point exuding
from the almost imperceptible hole is one of them. A hundred and fifty
thousand of them make a pound. The wire costs a dollar; the screws are
worth nine hundred and fifty dollars. The magic touch of the machine
makes that wire nine hundred and fifty times more valuable. The operator
sets them in regular rows upon a thin plate. When the plate is full, it
is passed to another machine, which cuts the little groove upon the top
of each,--and of course exactly in the same spot. Every one of those
hundred and fifty thousand screws in every pound is accurately the same
as every other, and any and all of them, in this pound or any pound, any
one of the millions or ten millions of this size, will fit precisely
every hole made for this sized screw in every plate of every watch made
in the factory. They are kept in little glass phials, like those in
which the homoeopathic doctors keep their pellets.
The fineness and variety of the machinery are so amazing, so
beautiful,--there is such an exquisite combination of form and
movement,--such sensitive teeth and fingers and wheels and points of
steel,--such fairy knives of sapphire, with which King Oberon the first
might have been beheaded, had he insisted upon levying dew-taxes upon
primroses without the authority of his elves,--such smooth cylinders,
and flying points so rapidly revolving that they seem perfectly
still.--such dainty oscillations of parts with the air of intelligent
consciousness of movement,--that a machinery so extensive in details, so
complex, so harmonious, at length entirely magnetizes you with wonder
and delight, and you are firmly persuaded that you behold the magnified
parts of a huge brain in the very act of thinking out watches.
In various rooms, by various machines, the work of perfecting the parts
from the first blank form cut out of Connecticut brass goes on. Shades
of size are adjusted by the friction of whirring cylinders coated with
diamond dust. A flying steel point touched with diamond paste pierces
the heart of the "jewels." Wheels rimmed with brass wisps hum steadily,
as they frost the plates with sparkling gold. Shaving of metal peel off,
as other edges turn, so impalpably fine that five thousand must be laid
side by side to make an inch. But there is no dust, no unseemly noise.
All is cheerful and airy, the faces of the workers most of all. You pass
on from point to point, from room to room. Every machine is a day's
study and a life's admiration, if you could only tarry. No wonder the
director says to me, as we move on, that his whole consciousness is
possessed by the elaborate works he superintends.
He opens a door, while we speak, and you would not be in the least
surprised, in the exalted condition to which the wonderful spectacle has
brought you, to hear him say, "In this room we keep the Equator." In
fact, as the door opens, and the gush of hot air breathes out upon your
excited brain, it seems to you as if it undoubtedly were the back-door
to--the Tropics. It is the dial-room, in which the enamel is set. The
porcelain is made in London. It is reduced to a paste in this room, and
fused upon thin copperplates at white heat. When cooled, it is ground
off smoothly, then baked to acquire a smooth glaze. It is then ready for
painting with the figures.
When all the pieces of the watch-movement are thus prepared, they are
gathered in sets, and carried to the putting-up room, where each part
is thoroughly tested and regulated. The pieces move in processions of
boxes, each part by itself; and each watch, when put together, is as
good as every other. In an old English lever-watch there are between
eight and nine hundred pieces. In the American there are but about a
hundred and twenty parts. My friend the director says, that, if you put
a single American against a single European watch, the foreign may vary
a second less in a certain time; but if you will put fifty or a hundred
native against the same number of foreign watches, the native group will
be uniformly more accurate. In the case of two watches of exactly the
same excellence, the regulator of one may be adjusted to the precise
point, while that of the other may imperceptibly vary from that point.
But that is a chance. The true test is in a number.
"If now we add," ticked the faithful friend in my pocket, "that
watch-movements of a similar grade without the cases are produced here
at half the cost of the foreign, doesn't it seem to you that we have
Lancashire and Warwickshire in England and Locle and La Chaux de Fond in
Switzerland upon the hip?"
"It certainly does," I answered,--for what else could I say?
Five different sizes of watches are made at Waltham. The latest is the
Lady's Watch, for which no parent or lover need longer go to Geneva. And
the affectionate pride with which the manager took up one of the finest
specimens of the work and turned it round for me to see was that of a
parent showing a precious child.
While we strolled through every room, the workers were not less
interesting to see than the work. There are now about three hundred and
fifty of them, of whom nearly a third are women. Scarcely twenty are
foreigners, and they are not employed upon the finest work. Of course,
as the machinery is peculiar to this factory, the workers must be
specially instructed. The foremen are not only overseers, but teachers;
and I do not often feel myself to be in a more intelligent and valuable
society than that which surrounded me, a wondering, staring, smiling,
inquiring, utterly unskilful body in the ancestral halls of my tried
friend and trusty counsellor, The American Watch.
* * * * *