commanding, aid to our own country in developing its iron industry. By the year 1850 our available supplies of raw materials had been pretty well ascertained, and more or less exploited. About that time the iron ore of the Cleveland district, the last of the great ore fields of Britain to be opened up, had been discovered, and was in process of development. The discoveries of British ores made since that time have been comparatively insignificant. We have opened up fields in Lincolnshire, Northampton, Leicestershire, Nottingham, and Oxfordshire! We have also found a good deal of ore not then dreamt of in North-West Lancashire and West Cumberland.

But in nearly all other countries their iron ore fields were entirely virgin half a century ago, and for the most part entirely unknown. In Germany no serious attempt was being made to work the important deposits of Alsace-Lorraine, which now form the staple of the supplies of that country. France had not developed, nor probably had thought of developing, the large deposits of Nancy and of the Meurthe-et-Moselle, which now furnish more than one-half of the total French iron production. More important than all else, the United States had not ascertained the extent, character, and possibilities of the vast deposits of iron ore in the five great ranges now comprised under the generic name of the Lake Superior region, and furnishing to-day the material for about three-fourths of the American pigiron output of 17 million tons per annum. So far as the other iron-making nations are concerned, some of their deposits had, of course, been exploited and worked for many years. Notably those of Dannemora in Sweden, of Styria in Austria, and of Blagodat in Russia. But these sources were subject to large limitations, and were used in what would now be regarded as

almost homoeopathic doses. The Styrian Erzberg, or the almost classic mines of Dannemora, would be well-nigh exhausted in a single year if worked on American lines. Their longevity has been promoted, if not entirely ensured, by the fact that they have been worked on a small scale-so small a scale that I can remember the time when the Alpine Montangesellschaft, which controls the Erzberg of Austria, used about thirty blast furnaces to accomplish the work that is now easily accomplished by three. This was the case when, in 1881, the Iron and Steel Institute, during my secretaryship, visited Styria.

The same remarks that have been applied to the discovery and application of iron ores, apply, mutatis mutandis, to the utilization of mineral fuel. In your own district Dud Dudley was the greatest pioneer in this direction. It was many years before England lost the benefit of the start which was definitely made in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the United States, coke was not applied to any extent in the iron industry until about the middle of the nineteenth century. In Germany and France, up to about the same period, charcoal iron was the chief product, although in this country the scarcity of fuel had practically compelled the abandonment of that branch of the trade more than a century earlier. The recent strides made by the American iron industry have coincided with the general adoption of coke for smelting, instead of the charcoal and anthracite coal formerly used. The fuel problem, I may here add, is one that threatens to become serious in this country within a measurable distance of time, and especially in Scotland and the North of England. Good and cheap coke are essential bases of the iron industry. Few countries have hitherto enjoyed the benefit of such supplies to the same extent as ourselves. In no other country has there been such a depletion of

the coal required for metallurgical coke: but it may be some satisfaction to reflect that while our supplies are probably nearer exhaustion than those of our greatest rivals, those rivals, like ourselves, will, within the next half-century, at the present rate of exhaustion, have probably more reason to be alarmed for their future than our own country has to-day. It is certain that no country can now be said to have supplies that are correctly described as inexhaustible. That word was much more fitly applied to many stores of iron ore when the world's production of pig-iron was under 6 or even under 10 million tons a year, as it was in the earlier half of the nineteenth century; but now that the world's output of iron has risen to considerably over 40 million tons, involving the consumption of probably 130 to 140 million tons of ore annually, the word exhaustion has come to have a practical and an immediate import which it has never had before. Even the vast deposits of Lake Superior may have their duration measured by the span of a single generation, or two generations at the most.

The Pig-iron Industry.-We will now proceed to consider the geographical conditions and general economic situation of the British iron and steel industries. You are, of course, aware that there are in this country several districts engaged in the production of iron and steel, varying from Scotland in the north to Northampton in the south, and Glamorganshire in the west. In these districts there are 146 works and 587 blast furnaces. Of the blast furnaces not much more than one-half have on an average been in use for a good many years past. Those that have not been employed are, for the most part, old and dilapidated furnaces, which are of little or no value except as scrap. The maximum number of furnaces that can be used with commercial success at

any one time may be taken as 400, that being the average of the year 1900, when the conditions of trade stimulated production to the utmost.

Fifty years ago the supply of iron ore required for the purposes of the British iron industry was mainly obtained from the older iron-making centres of Scotland, South Staffordshire, South Wales, and South and West Yorkshire. These districts mainly furnished ores from the coal measures; and it was not a rare thing to see coal and ironstone being mined from the same mine. The ores, generally speaking, were poor in iron, and inferior in quality, having too much phosphorus to be suited for the manufacture of steel. The development of the Bessemer process of steel manufacture between 1860 and 1875, and of the open-hearth system between 1875 and the present time, has called for pig-iron free from these contaminations, except where, since the year 1880, the basic steel process developed by Mr. S. G. Thomas has been adopted. The first-fruits of the adoption of the steel manufacture on a large scale was an impulse to the mining of the pure ores of West Cumberland and North-West Lancashire. For a time. those ores sufficed for the needs of the British steel trades; except in so far as exported Swedish bar-iron furnished the raw material of the Sheffield crucible steel industry, which, however, was never of much relative magnitude, and the utmost yield of which never probably exceeded 100,000 tons a year. Those works that were not situated conveniently to the iron ores of the West Coast, such as Dowlais, Ebbw Vale, Consett, etc., had to seek for supplies elsewhere. At this juncture the Bilbao district in the north of Spain came to the rescue. Within the last twenty years our imports of iron ore from this district alone have advanced from only a few thousand tons to nearly 7 million tons a year. Thirty years ago

our pig-iron output of 6 million tons a year was virtually entirely the product of home ores. To-day, nearly onehalf of our total product of iron is smelted from imported ores, which are drawn from more than thirty different countries, including some of our own colonies, but of which some three-fourths continues to be supplied by Spain. Meanwhile, great changes have also taken place in the sources of our home supplies of ore. The Cleveland district, first opened about 1850, has for the last twelve or fifteen years supplied more than a third of our total home output. The output of Scotland has fallen to only about a third, and that of Staffordshire and South and West Yorkshire to less than a fifth, of their former maximum; while South Wales has virtually dropped out of the home ore business entirely, and now lives entirely on imported ores. Of other districts that have come more prominently to the front during the last twenty years, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, and Nottinghamshire are entitled to notice. These five districts, added to the Cleveland, now produce annually some 9 to 9 million tons of ore of a cheap and low grade character, the percentage of iron ranging from 28 to 35, and the calcined material, as charged into the blast furnaces, ranging from 40 to 45 per cent. of iron.

The future of the British iron industry will, it need hardly be said, greatly depend on the extent to which it can command cheap and abundant raw materials, in the form of ores and fuel. It is apprehended by some authorities that our outlook is far from satisfactory in respect of both. Not that the supply is exhausted, but that its extent is uncertain and its quality tending to inferiority. The ores of the West Coast occur in veins or pockets, which have a habit of suddenly giving out when least expected. Some of the largest deposits in