Another great industrial combination is the Diamond State Works,
established in 1853, occupying a whole block, and enjoying a frontage
of three hundred and fifty feet on the Christine. Here are made the
vast variety of things into which iron can be rolled or pinched.
The eye is puzzled and pleased at the groups of intelligent machines
standing up in their places and moulding with their steel fingers the
rivets and the bolts; the railroad spikes, washers and fish-joints;
the nuts, whether hot-pressed or cold-pressed; the lag-screws and
the bolt-ends. Bars of all sizes and for an endless number of
uses are pressed out like dough, and stored for sale in enormous
warehouses. Mr. Mendinhall and Mr. Clement B. Smyth, the president
and vice-president of this company, are of long experience in the
management of their business; and the business of the company
increases from year to year, demanding all the room in its commodious
location, and necessitating an office in New York, where, at No.
71 Broadway, the large disbursing interests of the works are partly
attended to.

Such are the bare commercial facts. But stand in one of these noisy
working-grounds of a manufacturing place like Wilmington, or ride up
to the top of one of their buildings on the steam-elevators which some
of them employ. Think how these men of iron are changing the surface
of the earth, spiking rails to the prairie in distant territories,
or sending into Polynesian archipelagoes the rivet on whose integrity
depends the safety of the iron ship. How needful to human progress
is the conscientious perfection of their work! What tact they must
employ in dealing with phalanxes of laborers of different nations
and imperfect intelligence! What a stimulus to genius they are,
with their readiness to catch at any labor-saving machine! See that