- duced to prove that the chain and anchor manufacturers
of this country required to be placed under the immediate control of the Board of Trade. It will be a dark day for the mechanics of Great Britain when this system prevails, and we may then abandon all hope of ever becoming, what we have long aimed to be, the workshop of the world. But what I cannot too strongly condemn is, the principle of appointing Government officials—too frequently underpaid—to superintend or inspect the work of the manufacturer and to regulate the standard of merit. If a manufacturer can produce an article which, by some means or other, is able to pass inspection, it is a matter, now, of far less consequence than formerly to make it of the best description, as, in the case of accident, he screens himself behind the official certificate of its merit. Besides, the test Government, originally, adopted too often destroyed in a great measure the elasticity of chain cables[1]—a quality of the utmost importance to a ship riding at anchor in a heavy sea-way. I quite admit that many vessels and too many lives have been lost through inferior anchors and cables; but a still larger number of vessels have been sacrificed by defective construction, decayed
- ↑ It may not now be the case, but I have known a chain cable, made of the best iron, and it would only be iron of the best description which could stand such a strain, stretched from 150 fathoms, its length when manufactured, to 155 fathoms after it had passed through the testing-machine. Such an enormous strain must injure the fibre of the iron, and, thereby, its elasticity, even though most of this stretch would probably be due to the links fitting closer into each other, and the actual stretch of the iron itself only a small portion of the whole. But in either case the elasticity of the fibre would most likely be injured, perhaps destroyed.
