Everybody now knows that, owing to the richness and fusi-
bility of Missouri ores, furnaces using those ores and raw Illinois coal mixed with coke, yield from
twenty-five to thirty per cent, more iron per day than furnaces of the same dimensions in any other
locality of this country or in Europe, and that the quality of the iron is excellent ; that enough
good iron can be produced from Missouri ores and Illinois coal to supply tlie wants of the country ;
and the fact is now also well known that good pig-^iron can be produced in Missouri and Illinois at
a cost of labor varying not far from that required in Wales (England), which is the most favorable
country of Europe for making iron. There are greater facilities for obtaining ore and coal in Wales
than any other country of Europe, but neither in Wales nor upon any other part of the earth's sur-
face, 80 far as my information goes, are ore and coal so accessible as in Missouri and Illinois. It
must be borne in mind that all manufacturing, especially iron, is produced, by labor; and in the
production of iron, until the discovery by Bessemer, the refining of iron from the pig into the
bloom, or bringing it to *' nature," as the refiners term it, wns the hardest and the most toilsome
labor that man had ever been required to perform. This labor must be performed upon our pig-
iron as now made in order to produce merchantable iron or rails, and the costof producing pig-iron
is better determined by the quantity one man can make in a day, than by the amount of dollars and
cents or shillings and pence he is paid. It requires, in Wales, the labor of one man for thirteen
days to produce a ton of pig-iron, or thirteen men one day. In Missouri and Illinois the labor of
one man, eight days, or eight men one day, can make a ton of pig-iron, which will make a rail that
will last three times as long as the ordinary Welsh rail. In Wales the subsistence of the thirteen
men, their food and shelter, is equal to the labor of five men ; in the Mississippi Valley, subsisting
eight men requires the labor of three men. 