great war, Birmingham made three million
muskets for the government, besides one million
for the East lndia Company—something like a
thousand muskets every day for twelve years.
In the busiest of these years the product was
a musket a minute! All the barrels were made
at Birmingham; but some of the muskets were
made up in London and other places. During
the recent struggle in America, the gun-trade at
Birmingham underwent many singular fluctuations.
As soon as the United States had
determined to wage resolute war with the
Confederates, three or four persons appeared at
Birmingham on one day, all, unknown to each
other, bent on purchasing arms for America,
either for the government or for speculators;
between them they cleared out the existing stock,
and gave orders for more. When the troubles
about the Trent affair commenced, an embargo
was placed on the export of arms from England;
but when the clearing up of difficulties allowed
the embargo to be removed, Birmingham set to
work more vigorously than ever. Whether
"Feds" or "Confeds," it was all one to her;
she sold muskets to whomsoever wanted them,
and would pay for them. No less than forty
thousand muskets were shipped off by one
steamer from Southampton. During part of
the time, Birmingham worked faster than at any
former period in her history, making and proving
two thousand barrels per day. From first
to last, from the firing of the first shot at Fort
Sumter to the surrender of Lee's army,
England sent more than a million of muskets to
America, two-thirds of which came from
Birmingham. At the present day there are six
hundred gun-manufacturers in this town, great
and small, or, at least, makers of the various parts
of guns, employing more than seven thousand
hands. According to Mr. Goodman, who read
a paper on this subject at the last meeting of
the British Association, there are seven hundred
making gun-barrels, twelve hundred making
gunlocks, five hundred making bayonets, one
thousand making and fitting the wooden stocks,
one thousand screwing up or putting the
muskets together, one thousand finishing the
arms when made up, and nearly two thousand
engaged in various subsidiary employments. A
mighty army this, all engaged in making weapons
intended to slaughter either men or birds. No
wonder that Birmingham could take the principal
part in making the six million small arms
which England has turned out in six years.

The beautiful establishment at Enfield would
in all probability not have existed had "Brown
Bess" continued to reign. The extreme accuracy
requisite for a rifled musket, as compared with a
smooth-bore, entailed a necessity for improved
tools and machines; and these improvements
offered a temptation for the founding of a government
establishment. The theory of a rifled
barrel, to give accuracy of flight to the bullet, is
some centuries old; but it was not till modern
times that new forms of bullet to fill the rifled
grooves were successfully devised. There was
Sir Home Popham's elongated sphero-cylindrical
bullet; and Captain Beaufoy's elongated bullet,
with a hemispherical cavity at the end; and
Joseph Manton's bullet, with a wooden cup at
the end; and Captain Delvigne's expanded
chamber behind the bullet; and Mr. Greener's
expanding bullet; and Mr. Pritchett's cylindrical
plug; and Captain Minié's furrowed bullet;
and Mr. Lancaster's oval bore; and Mr.
Whitworth's hexagonal bore: these and numerous
others were various modes of rendering the spiral
grooves of a rifle more efficacious. What is
called the long Enfield was not the invention
of any one person; it was a kind of eclectic
combination of good qualities from various quarters.
And the same may be said of the short
Enfield more recently introduced. Minié liked
a bore rather under three-quarters of an inch;
Mr. Whitworth, one less than half an inch;
while the Enfield has settled down to a calibre
just about half way between the two.

Enfield, we have said, owes its beautiful
factory mainly to the introduction of machinery
into the gun trade. This resulted from a visit,
directed by the government, made by Mr. Anderson
and Mr. Whitworth to the New York
Industrial Exhibition. These two eminent engineers
examined the machines invented by Colonel
Colt, Mr. Blanshard, and others, for making
rifles and pistols in America; and the superior
accuracy, rapidity, and cheapness of the system,
attracted the attention of our government. Mr.
Anderson, visiting Birmingham after his return
from America, commented on the harum-scarum
way in which the hand method was conducted.
"In visiting Birmingham, any stranger must be
much struck with the number of persons, men
and women, boys and girls, that he meets in the
streets, carrying parts of muskets on their
shoulders and in other ways, and with the great
waste that necessarily goes on under such an
arrangement, carrying the parts from one place
to another. Of course the wages that are thus
paid come into the price of the gun. I am quite
sure that if we had a map of Birmingham, with
all the walks through the highways and byways
of the town that the several parts of a musket
have to travel, it would do far more than
anything I could say to advocate the proposed plan
—to have everything connected with the musket
passing consecutively from one stage to another,
never passing over the same ground twice. The
rude materials, entering the factory at one end,
should come out a finished musket at the
other."

And so it was decided that the Enfield Small
Arms Factory should be established, partly from
the necessity of furnishing the army with rifles
instead of smooth bores, and partly for the
purpose of introducing machinery into this very
elaborate branch of manufacture. Selecting the
small works already existing, making firm
foundations in the marshy ground, building large and
fine workshops and engine-houses on the ground,
and stocking them with some of the finest
machinery ever seen in this country, the government
have spent on this spot something like two
hundred thousand pounds in the last twelve