apparatus for setting in motion the hundreds
of flax machines. Here, therefore, not only
are the operations of hundreds of cottages
and cottagers concentrated in one building,
but the building itself may be said to be
concentrated in one room, where all that
mechanical skill can effect is effected, to make
every hour's work do the best that it can.
Flax cannot be wrought and spun without
much dust and a little wet; but the workers
can pursue their labours with much less of
personal discomfort than under any variety
of the older system.

Scene the Third—a Bradford alpaca-mill.
Alpaca, by the care now bestowed upon its
production, is made to produce fabrics of
much beauty for ladies' dresses, not only in
its uncombined state, but also when combined
with silk and cotton. Mohair, too, (the hair
of the Angora goat) has come greatly into
favour. Bradford contains many immense
factories—on the Lancashire plan—for working
up wool, and alpaca, and mohair into
cloth or stuff; and more are being built:
but if the world will continue to demand
more stuff, more alpaca, more mohair, there
must be an increased expansibility in the
manufacturing arrangements for their supply.
And thus do we find a clue to the origin of
Saltaire. Mr. Titus Salt, one of the magnates
of industry at Bradford, has several establishments
in the town, which have grown with
the growth of manufactures; but the time
has come when organisation and centralisation
are wanted; and these are about to be
obtained by a scheme of (perhaps) unparalleled
boldness.

On the line of the Leeds and Skipton Railway
there is a point at which a small river-
valley branches out southward to the town
of Bradford, about three miles distant. And
at the point of junction stands the town of
Shipley, one of the stuff-working satellites of
Bradford. Not far from Shipley is an estate
which Mr. Salt has recently purchased, crossed
by a road, a river, a canal, and a railway;
and on this estate is now being constructed
a factory which will, in many respects, be the
finest in the world, and will be the nucleus
of a town towards which great attention will
be attracted. A great power for good and for
evil will rest in the hands of the owner of
this gigantic establishment; and one feels
inclined to encourage a hope that the second
half of the nineteenth century may show
itself to be something more than a mere
steam-engine era.

If, leaving the Shipley railway station, we
ramble along the Bingley road, we come
shortly to what was once a wide expanse of
green fields, but is now the theatre of
immense building operations. It seems more
like a Legislative Palace, or a Record Office,
or some great public work, than a mere
factory belonging to one individual, which is
here under construction, so solid do appear
the masses of stone employed, and so vast the
scale on which the operations are planned.
The entire buildings will cover or enclose an
area of six acres. The chief structure,
technically called the "mill," will be a stone
building five hundred and fifty feet in length,
six stories in height, and having its crowning
cornice and its many hundreds of windows so
finished with dressed stone, as to give an
architectural grandeur to the whole. And
then, instead of frittering away the window
surface into numerous small panes of glass,
large sheets of cast plate-glass will be
employed. All that hollow-bricked floors can
effect in giving lightness and facilitating
ventilation; all that massive cast-iron beams
and ornamental cast-iron columns can do to
ensure strength; all that can be done in
rendering the structure fire-proof by avoiding
the use of wood, are duly considered and
provided for. Running northward from this
fine structure are two subordinate portions,
or wings, each about three hundred and
thirty feet in length, and as lofty as the main
structure; they are to be warehouses. Beyond
the western warehouse are large but low
buildings for the preparatory manufacturing
processes, while the other extremity is to be
devoted to weaving and finishing; the main
structure itself being the scene of the
intermediate or spinning processes. The raw
materials will thus enter one warehouse, traverse
the huge range in a circuit, and then reach
the other warehouse.

The arteries of communication are quite
extraordinary for their completeness. There
is, in the first place, a handsome new road
being formed along the western face of the
pile, crossing the Leeds and Skipton railway
by a cast-iron bridge, and then crossing both
the river Aire and the Leeds and Liverpool
canal by a wrought-iron tubular girder bridge
on the celebrated "Britannia Bridge"
principle, and about four hundred and fifty feet
in length. In the next place, the warehouses
abut northward on the canal, and will have
steam-worked "hoists" for loading and
unloading barges in the canal. In the third
place, a branch will be carried from the
railway into the building, where hoists will
load and unload the railway waggons with
great rapidity. And hoists will load and
unload ordinary waggons, and will raise and
lower materials from one story to another,
and will very likely raise and lower the
operatives themselves (or some of them) to
save leg-power.

Then the power for working this stupendous
concern: how vast must it be! The steam-
engines, of power adequate to the whole
demands of the mill, will occupy two handsome
engine-houses on either side of the principal
entrance; and will send off their smoke
into an Italian-looking campanile sort of
building, two hundred and fifty feet high.
Twelve hundred tons of solid stone are said
to have been employed to form the supporting
beds for the engines. The boilers beneath