France, and other countries. Indeed, the exhibit by the State Railways of France of an American locomotive at the Exposition was the cause of a stormy outburst in the Chamber of Deputies, in June last. Elizabethport sewing machines literally girdle the globe. English and German mills are now rolling Pittsburg billets and puddling Birmingham (Alabama) pig iron. The average daily shipment of pig iron from Birmingham to English and Continental ports at this writing is in excess of 1,000 tons, and would be greater if freight room were available. It should be frankly admitted that good times in Europe and Great Britain in recent years have favored this movement, and that when industrial reaction comes again there our conquests will be less easy. It is not impossible that we may be largely shut out of Germany and England proper; but the great world beyond — which those industrious nations have been supplying — will afford us a constantly growing and profitable trade.

At the moment, the British, and to some extent the German, blast furnaces and steel works are embarrassed by scarcity and high cost of coal. These facts, and the growing demands of trades unionism, are the serious dangers that threaten English manufacturers. While it is not reasonable to expect that bituminous coal will long continue to sell at $5 to $7 per ton at English consuming centres, there is, nevertheless, the best of English authority for the statement that the days of cheap coal are forever past. This opens a prospect for extensive exports of American coal to the countries hitherto supplied by England; and it has a most direct bearing on the ability of Great Britain in the future to hold against American ironmakers the field which has hitherto been admittedly her own.

The possibilities of the future of the iron and steel industry of America sometimes engage the imagination of our technical writers. If we base our calculations upon the ratio of growth of the past, we quickly run into figures that stagger the mind. Nearly half a century ago, before America had reached the half-millon-ton mark in production, Mr. Abram S. Hewitt, in an address before the American Geographical Society, predicted that the world would make 28,000,000 tons pig iron in 1895, and 48,000,000 tons in 1915. On this basis the output for 1899 should have been 35,000,000 tons, but it actually reached 40,000,000 tons, and the consumption, gauged by depletion of stocks, was nearly a million tons more. In 1890 Mr. Edward Atkinson estimated the world's pig iron output for 1900 at 40,000,000 tons. Both he and Mr. Hewitt merely used the rule of

doubling output every twenty years. If the same law is to hold in the future, the world will require 80,000,000 tons in 1920; and if America maintains her rate of progress, relatively speaking, she will supply much more than half of it. That would mean trebling in the next two decades our already vast plant of furnaces, steel works, rolling mills, and iron foundries, as well as the product of our ore and coal mines.

The most optimistic believer in American destiny and progress can scarcely bring himself to these figures. But we must not be too hasty in rejecting them. Mr. Hewitt has been quoted recently as saying that the world is practically rebuilt three times in a century. We are now demolishing in New York the first iron fire-proof buildings erected here thirty-five years ago, replacing them with modern structures. We have scarcely commenced to use steel in ordinary house construction, Germany being far in advance of us in this particular. Every day new uses of iron and steel are found, and construction of every character is yearly growing heavier. One concern now takes from the Carnegie Company a thousand tons a day of steel plates to use in pressed steel cars- an industry unknown until two years ago. The cry in every part of the world is for more ships to transport the rapidly growing commerce. No one doubts that the United States, in spite of its poor record of ship-building, since the war, is destined to fill a great rôle in the building of the merchant marine. Those who have watched the progress of construction of new ship yards at Camden, New London, and elsewhere, as well as the extension of existing plants at Philadelphia, Newport News, and San Francisco, are aware that the Clyde and Belfast builders are soon to have rivals in the full sense of the term. A great ship in these days might almost be said to contain nothing but steel and iron. The preparations for war by most of the nations of the earth are on an everincreasing scale, and the great mass of the materials required in the manufacture of ordnance and small arms comes from our steel works and foundries.

In a recent address Mr. Edward Atkinson, full of the spirit of expansion, again dealt with the future of the iron and steel industry. He stated that the extension of railroad lines in this country in the next fifteen years would carry the mileage from 200,000 to 300,000 miles; and President John K. Cowen, of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad, declares this to be conservative, if the construction of electric lines be included. The era of bridge building has just begun. An authority

on this subject stated recently that the requirements of the South alone for bridge building material would enormously increase in the near future. Scarcely a railroad bridge south of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers is strong enough to-day to support a train of the new 100ton cars with the massive locomotive required to pull them. The Southern people have been content until now to ford their streams when travelling in the country; but, in the past year or two, with steadily increasing wealth, a demand has sprung up for improved roads, and for bridges to correspond.

A hundred other illustrations might be cited of the tendency of the consumption of iron and steel to grow, not at the normal rate of population and general manufactures, but in an accelerating ratio. The progress of modern civilization seems to be peculiarly linked with iron. After eight months of reaction from an over-rapid development in this industry, it is comforting to reflect that the advance of civilization as represented by the iron industry is not likely to be interrupted in the early years of the new century.

ARCHER BROWN.

THE ENGLISH INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT.

THAT branch of the War Office known officially as "the military intelligence of the commander in chief's department" was called into existence some forty odd years ago. The experience of the Crimean war had proved its paramount necessity. England entered upon that campaign in complete ignorance of the theatre of war, of its topography, resources, population. There was nothing on record and there were no means of obtaining information at the eleventh hour. One or two enterprising travellers who had penetrated the Crimea were sought out and questioned; and the British admiral in the Black Sea was instructed to send despatch vessels to explore the coasts and spy out the land. Darkness prevailed, and the allied armies disembarked on a terra incognita, for the French military authorities were no better informed than our own.

At the end of the war it was resolved to change all that. Such is the attitude of the British public at the end of every war, for every serious and protracted conflict throws up into strong relief the inconsistencies and shortcomings of our military system. We are at this moment promised much searching inquiry from which many drastic, far-reaching reforms are confidently anticipated. It must be left to the next generation to decide how far promise is to be borne out by performance; but it is certain that no improvements which may be shortly introduced will so justly claim approval as the now long established Intelligence Department. The latter has been much criticised during the last year. It has been blamed for not discharging functions that were wrongly attributed to it, and charged with neglect and supineness in matters on which it was seen that it had been fully on the alert. However, it has amply vindicated the wisdom of its creation, and this despite the often meagre means at hand and the difficulties imposed by narrow-minded superior administration. What the Intelligence Department has done shall now be set forth briefly: and what it may yet accomplish if its uses should be more liberally appreciated and encouraged shall also be foreshadowed.

The beginnings of the branch were small and unpretending. It grew out of a department known as the "Topographical and Statistical," which had been created in 1855 and enlarged in 1857, in deference to the recommendations of a committee presided over by Lord Panmure. There was no room for it then under the War Office roof, nor has there been since, although the roofs have been extended so as to embrace half one side of Pall Mall. It was constantly boarded out, finding its first home in Spring Gardens, near Charing Cross, and just opposite the back door of the Admiralty Buildings. When the consistent and strenuous efforts of its officers resulted in an ever increasing accumulation of papers and a great store of maps, it moved into more spacious quarters at Adair House, next door to the Junior Carlton Club. It might have remained there had not the club enlarged its premises. The Department was accordingly expropriated and took up its residence in Queen Anne's Gate. Changes in its constitution, increasing its scope of usefulness, had already been decided upon in 1871, and two years later the Intelligence Branch was called into existence and added to the Topographical. Two years more and the Intelligence became the more worthy and swallowed up its elder, and the new name has been used now for five and twenty years.

The house at 18 Queen Anne's Gate, although of very respectable dimensions, is fast becoming too small, and the Department has already annexed another house in Carteret Street. There will probably be no further change until the final move into the new War Office, the long-wanted edifice which is to be built at last, this side of the Greek kalends, we may hope, upon the site in Whitehall. Every room in Queen Anne's Gate is appropriated and fully occupied. Many members of the staff sit together, and all available space is crammed with tables and presses, despatch boxes and official boxes. It is not easy to gain admittance to the office or even past the waiting room at the threshold. A lynx-eyed Cerberus looks at the visitor suspiciously and demands his card. Notice boards intimate how strictly the place is guarded. One recites the Act, with all its penalties, against divulging official secrets; another informs gentlemen of the press who come "wanting to know" that they must apply at headquarters - the War Office in Pall Mall—as the Intelligence has nothing to tell outsiders. Yet, whosoever brings proper credentials is welcomed, and is permitted to know something of its methods, its staff, and its ways of working.