HIS month THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS is printed by Messrs. Clowes and Sons, one of the highest-class printing establishments in the Kingdom. The first numbers were printed by the Hansard Union, then the printing was transferred to the Carlyle Press, where it remained until the present number. On the failure of Mr. Burgess, however, it was necessary to seek a fresh printer, and the present number is produced by Messrs. Clowes and Sons. The changes which circumstances have forced upon me have naturally led me to take more interest in printing establishments and printing machines than I have hitherto done. Although it was a foggy night at the end of November, when I was much too busy with the work of getting out the Review to have much time to devote to visits of inspection in any direction, I acceded to the request of Mr. Byers that I should go and see a new printing machine which has just been installed at the works of the English Feister Printing Company, Limited, in Coleman Street, Islington. How we got there I do not exactly know, nor how we got back again, but we trusted ourselves entirely to the pilotage of the driver of our hansom, and seldom has that gondola of London been more indispensable in threading the maze that intervenes between Mowbray House and Coleman Street. When we arrived at our destination, we found it was the establishment of the English Feister Printing Company, Limited. "Now," said Mr. Byers, as we entered, "you will see the machine which is going to revolutionise the printing trade of the world."

The machine for which such lofty claim was made had just been put up, and was doing its first round of printing, using for the experiment some old electrotype-plates which had previously been used for one of the numbers of this Review.

"Explain your revolution," I said to Mr. Byers, who, nothing loth, entered into an enthusiastic description of the machine, which he declared was the latest triumph of the mechanical genius of man.

Mr. Byers is an American, who for the last two years or more has brooded over the idea of this machine; and now that it has been transferred from the domain of the ideal to that of the practical and material, he is as proud as a hen who has hatched her first chicken. Not that this is Mr. Byers' first chicken, for Mr. Byers has had many chickens. He has only hatched it, as the egg was none of his own laying. The machine, to drop metaphor, was originally an American invention, but it has been improved by the genius of two English engineers, Mr. Alexander Gray and Mr. Gibson. The original inventor of the machine was Henry P. Feister, who went to America some years ago, and put up the machine called after his name in the Quaker city. A specimen of this unimproved machine has been at work for some time in London, grinding out pamphlets with an automatic regularity.

Mr. Byers, however, has a soul above pamphlets, and believes that the new improved machine, of which Joseph J. Byers and Co. are the sole agents in England and France, is destined to make a general overturn in the printing trade of the world. But it is best to let Mr. Byers speak for himself.

"This machine," said Mr. Byers enthusiastically, "has solved the problem with which all printing engineers have been grappling in vain for the last twenty years. It will print at newspaper speed from an endless web with the precision of a flat machine. It will not only do this, but it will fold, paste, cut, and deliver at the same time. The machines are adapted to take pamphlets or books varying in width and containing pages which are multiples of four up to thirty-two pages. These sets of thirty-two pages can then be collated, and books of larger sizes made up. The old Feister was no use except for the very longest orders. The cylinder was cased in wood, and the plates were nailed in position. It took six or seven days to prepare for printing, and it was not worth while unless you had an order for at least a million copies. Orders for a million copies are not so plentiful as smaller orders, so it was absolutely necessary for general business to provide a cylinder in which plates could be fixed more rapidly. This object has been attained in the new machine. We can put on a plate with the utmost simplicity, and owing to the perfection with which all the parts have been made and put together, we can undertake to print anything, and we are not without hope that some day we may even print THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS."

"Well," said I," that will depend upon many things. You certainly will not print it, unless you can print it as well as it is being printed on flat machines."

"We will print it better," said Mr. Byers, with calm assurance. "We will print it better, more rapidly, and more economically. That one machine," said he, pointing to it with pride, " dispenses with the labour of about thirty pair of hands. One man and a boy will supply all the attendance that is required." "Your pasting

"I do not exactly admire that," I said. arrangement, for instance, will destroy the industry of the girls who stitch the magazines."

"All labour-saving apparatus," said Mr. Byers, "in the end, creates a fresh demand for labour. For one of your stitching girls who is thrown out of work as a stitching girl two will be wanted to deal with the increased business which the increased facility of production will inevitably bring into existence."

Probably," said I, "but in the meantime- Well, well, go on with your machine."

"No," said Mr. Byers, "I am not going to explain this machine, for I am not a mechanician, I am only the holder of the patents. But here is Mr. Gray: he will explain its true inwardness to you."

I turned to Mr. Gray, who, on being appealed to, gave me a technical account of the machine, and the points which differentiate it from any other machines.

The machine, he said, is designed to print pamphlets of various sizes without the necessity of having rollers of different diameters. It takes paper from the reel, feeds it in, cuts it into sheets of the required length, prints first one side of the sheet and then the other. The sheets are collected together, and as each sheet is collected it is pasted along the middle line, after which the bundle of sheets is thrown down on to the cover placed on the folding-table you see in front of the machine.

THE "FEISTER" PATENT PRINTING MACHINE (WITH GIBSON'S IMPROVEMENTS.)

The sheets and cover are then folded so as to form

a pamphlet or book. The pamphlets thus prepared, being already pasted, require nothing more than to be cut and trimmed. The machine consists of four cylinders; two of them are forme, or printing, cylinders, and theother two hold the paper to be printed. In addition to these cylinders there are the necessary subsidiary machines for cutting, collecting, pasting and folding, all combined in the construction so as to co-operate harmoniously for the end in view. The cylinders are sufficiently wide to take several rows of printing plates side by side, and they are sufficiently large in diameter to be able to print thirty-two pages for each revolution of the cylinder. It is consequently possible to print from two to six or more complete books of thirty-two pages each, side by side, at each revolution. All this is done with the assistance of one man and a boy.

Demand, sir," said Mr. Byers. "Why Mother Seigel's Syrup alone requires 120 million copies of a thirty-two paged pamphlet. One hundred and twenty millions every year."

"One hundred and twenty millions," said I, sceptically. "Yes," said Mr. Byers. "But let me introduce you to Mr. H. K. Packard, from Chicago, who has accepted a seat on the Board of the English Feister Printing Company. Mr. Packard, as Managing Director, has mainly contributed to the enormous success of A. J. White, Limited.""

"Yes," said Mr. Packard, "our annual consumption of pamphlets is 120 millions, and I think this machine will enable us to get them done quicker and better than we have been able to produce them hitherto."

But," said I, somewhat dazed with the figures, "do you mean to say that you actually disseminate throughout the world 120 million pamphlets about your syrup?"

"That is the figure," said Mr. Packard. "To send them out costs us £100 a day in postage stamps, to say nothing of the cost of private delivery. We produce these pamphlets in twenty different languages at present, and the business is but in its infancy."

"But will you be able to print 120 million pamphlets on this machine ?"

"How you talk!" said Mr. Byers." You see these two machines," pointing to a second improved Feister which was being fitted up opposite to the one which was printing from the old electros. "These two machines will be able to turn out 180 millions of Mother Seigel's Syrup pamphlets in a twelvemonth; but we are having machines built, each of which will be capable of turning out onethird more work than these can do."

"It will take some business to keep them going, and there are not two Mother Seigels."

"No," said Mr. Byers," but there is no limit to this kind of printing. We are simply choked with orders, and the existing machines cannot turn the work out in time."

"But there is a limit, surely, to the world's consumption of patent medicine pamphlets?"

"No," said Mr. Packard, "there is no limit. We find that the more civilised and highly developed and prosperous a community is the more medicine it takes. In fact," said he, "you can hardly have a better test of

The

the prosperity and civilisation of a community than the patent medicine it consumes. It is invariably so. greater the health of the community the more medicine it takes, it is only the downright sickly localities where medicine seems to be at a discount; people lose heart. In prosperous communities, however, such as New Zealand and Australia, the demand for medicine is simply inexhaustible. There is more syrup taken per square mile in New Zealand and Australia than anywhere else on the world's surface."

"But," said Mr. Byers, "we are not going to stick to patent medicines, never you fear. We are going to print all the catalogues, and all the school books, and all the magazines, everything in fact which needs to be quickly produced in enormous quantities."

"Well," said I, "if you really can turn out pamphlets at that rate then there is a chance of the paper which I have dreamed of for many a long year."

66

66

How?" said Mr. Byers.

How? Why, if you can produce pamphlets as rapidly as newspapers, the newspaper of the future will be in the shape of a pamphlet, and if you can get magazine printing at newspaper speed, illustrations and all, then the revolution which you will make in the newspaper trade, will be greater than the one you propose to make in the printing trade. Just imagine the convenience of having a newspaper which you can read without putting your neighbour's eye out in a crowded railway carriage, and which you can double up and put in your pocket as easily as a magazine. That is the line for your machine if you can really do all that you say you can."

"Sir," said Mr. Byers, "we are going on all lines, newspaper lines as well as other lines. There is nothing that this machine cannot do. The days of the blanket paper are over and ended."

Well," said I, "we shall see; but I rather doubt the possibility of producing your pamphlets at the speed on which you are reckoning."

"We shall be able to deliver 240,000 copies of a thirtytwo paged morning paper with the new machines which we are having built," said Mr. Byers, positively. "Magazine printed, folded, pasted and cut in four hours, using six machines."

At what price do you sell your machines?"

"At no price," said Mr. Byers; "we would not sell it for its weight in diamonds. The machine is not for sale. No, sir, it is too valuable a patent for the company to part with the machines."

Then," said I," Mr. Byers, do you propose to keep the lion's share of the printing of the world in your own hands?"

"Yes," said Mr. Byers, "that is what I reckon we are going to do.' From which it will be seen that Mr. Byers is as sanguine as he is audacious.

The machine, as I saw it working, was making from sixteen to eighteen revolutions in a minute. Mr. Gray is confident that the machine will make twenty-four revolutions per minute. He believes it is quite possible to get the speed up to thirty, and even forty revolutions in the minute; but that is, at the present moment, not in the plane of realised fact. The machine, however, was doing better work in printing the illustrations of toned blocks than any other rotary machine that I have ever seen. was obvious that if this could be done with a scratch set of plates, put on the cylinder without overlay or underlay, much better results could be obtained with proper precautions. I left the building, feeling that the possibility of an improved illustrated English Petit Journal of handy shape was at last brought within the pale of practical possibilities.

It

HESE large volumes of the Life and Letters of

Mrs. Booth" will find many sympathetic readers who will by no means be confined to the Salvation Army. Mrs. Booth was a typical Englishwoman of the middle class, who,

I have not criticised? No! I could not, for I loved. With the love of a son-the respect, the admiration, the enthusiasm of a disciple. For critical biography I have neither time nor taste. The book, therefore, is not a critical estimate, in which

the writer sits as magistrate weighing in the balance of an impartial judgment the merits and demerits of a fellow creature, who is often immeasurably superior to the man in the judgment seat; but the enthusiastic and almost devotional record of the life-history of Mrs. Booth. Mr. Tucker is a lively writer, whose natu. ral rhetoric is coloured by his Salvationist surroundings. The following passage, in which he cxpresses the difficulties under which Salvationists labour when they betake themselves to literary work, is characteristic both of the man and of his cause:

The life of a Salvationist is a life of interruption. Wherever he goes there are "lions in the way." Telegrams and letters follow him to every retreat. Seclusion, privacy, and the quietude supposed to be necessary for literary enterprise-the words have been obliterated from his dictionary, the very ideas have almost faded from his mind. His table is a keg of spiritual gunpowder, his seat a cannon-ball, and he writes as best he may amid the whiz and crash of flying shot and shell, the rush and excitement of a never-ending battle, in which peace and truce are words unknown, and rest, in the ordinary sense of the word, is relegated to Heaven.

ous materials which have been placed at his disposal. For eleven months he has toiled over the work of editing, compiling, and condensing. As the net result we have three volumes of one edition, and two of another, of "The Life and Letters of Mrs. Booth" (published at the Salvation Army Headquarters, 101, Queen Victoria St., E.C.). Mr. Tucker, as befits one who has married into what profane outsiders call the "sacred family," is not in a critical mood, as the following passage from his preface shows:

Looking at these two portly and long-promised volumes, the criticism which naturally suggests itself to an outsider is that, while it may have been necessary that they should have been written, and that we should have in authentic shape the edited literary remains of Mrs. Booth,

they are more materials for a biography than a biography itself. Commissioner Tucker's book is biography, no doubt, but biography of the monumental kind. Such great books are too heavy for the frail craft of popular memory. No doubt they look well on library shelves, and are useful to have at hand to consult; but they are too much like Rushworth's" Memorials of the Civil War," or "Hansard's Parliamentary Debates," to be read and remembered by the ordinary busy man. Out of these twovolumes I hope that we shall have a volume containing what may be regarded as a kind of sublimated essence of Mrs. Booth's biography. It should not be much larger than the English Men of Letters Series, which would give it a general circulation, and it would come to be one of those volumes which the devout Englishman and Englishwoman would always have within reach. The Lives which live, from those in which Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give us the biography of Jesus of Nazareth, down to "Plutarch's Lives," deal not much with detail, but rather with the character-touches and light-points, which leave room for the imagination to work, and provide us rather with the outline of the soul rather than the complete inventory of the parts of the body with the appurtenances thereof.

To say that such a little book should be written is no disparagement to the larger book which lies before us, which is more monumental in its character, and which is intended to place on permanent record all that is thought should be known of the life and labours of one of the most indefatigable of her kind. It is a more serious criticism that in writing the life of Mrs. Booth, Mr. Tucker has naturally, but still somewhat unfortunately, made the memoir a history of the Salvation Army. No doubt it is impossible to separate Mrs. Booth's life from the history of the society which she and her husband founded, as it is as to separate the life of Ignatius Loyola from the history of the Society of Jesus. The biographer, however, would probably have been more useful if the historian of the Salvation Army had been kept more in the background. It is easy to understand how Mr. Tucker fell before this temptation. The Army is a living entity which is constantly with him, while Mrs. Booth has passed away from her earthly labours; and she, good soul, would probably indulge in exactly the opposite criticism to that which I am penning here, for she would have eliminated the personal element and brought the Army still more prominently to the front.

A CHILD OF NATURE AS WELL AS OF GRACE.

A truce, however, to such observations. The important thing is not the question of detail upon which the author and critic may differ, but the life that is revealed in these pages. It is, perhaps, the highest praise that can be given to Mr. Tucker to say that the net result of reading his voluminous narrative is to deepen and intensify the conception which those who knew her well during her life had formed of her remarkable character. We have here the woman as she was, with her characteristic traits sot forth naturally and simply, fortunately to a large extent by her own letters. Notwithstanding the fear under which the author labours, that he may be accused of exaggeration, the net result, upon outsiders at least, is that he has been scrupulously careful, and has in no way idealised the character of his subject. Mrs. Booth, although both a saint and a spiritual genius, as well as a woman of affairs, a devoted mother, an affectionate wife, is not idealised out of recognition. She was a very practical, matter-offact person, who, with a shrewd mother-wit and intense fervour of spirit, brought to the work of revivalism a character which, while admirably adapted for the task

to which she was set, disqualified her in many respects from posing as a romantic heroine of the saintly imagination. To use a phrase which she would not have resented, she was the "Lord's journeyman," doing the day's job with all her might, knowing that the night cometh when no man can work. Those who have gathered their conception of a saint from the more or less etherealised phantoms of the cloister or the shadowy figures of legendary fame, whose most substantial possession is their aureole, will find in many ways their susceptibilities shocked by the mundane English middle-classness of the Methodist type which characterised Mrs. Booth. The element of self-assertiveness-not on behalf of herself, if I may be pardoned an Irishism, but on behalf of her husband and the Salvation Army-somewhat jars upon those who have not learned to regard that organisation as the divinelyappointed instrument for the salvation of the world.

HER STANDPOINT.

But it is impossible to judge Mrs. Booth unless it is constantly borne in mind that to her and to those about her the Salvation Army was the supreme Church of God, as the Church of Rome was to Ignatius Loyola, to St. Dominic, or to any of the founders of the Catholic orders. To those who cannot, by any strain of the imagination realise how any human being, on looking out upon the world and all that is therein, can regard 101 Queen Victoria Street as the hub of the universe, Mrs. Booth will be an insoluble enigma, and they will be constantly affronted and sometimes outraged by the assumption upon which Mrs. Booth's life was based, namely, that as the world needed saving, in the fulness of time the Lord had raised up the Salvation Army for the purpose of carrying out the moral, social, and religious regeneration of mankind. It ought not to be difficult for any educated man to understand such a mode of thought. It is one that has been common to all religious reformers, and there are few who have injected a new and vitalising current of religious faith into the shrunk veins of the world who did not more or less feel convinced when they were doing it that theirs was the most important task ever intrusted by the Creator to any of those who are the work of His hands. The only difference between the Booths and others is that they have lived more in the open. This conviction of an exclusive Divine mission does not excite opposition as long as it is the secret opinion cherished in the cell or the study; but it is apt to provoke some cynical comments when proclaimed to all the world by innumerable brass bands.

THE PASSION OF PROPAGANDISM.

Even the most cynical critic, however, must admit that while there are many who draw all the radii of the universe from their own centre to the circumference of space, there are very few whose lives are as consistent as those of the Booths. Everyone is acquainted with the insufferable idiot who in art or sociology proclaims that he has discovered the secret of the universe, but who never takes the trouble to communicate the precious treasure of his inspiration to those who are in ignorance of it. degree of faith with which a man believes anything is best measured by the energy with which he endeavours to communicate the knowledge of that truth to his fellow creatures. Judged by this test no one can complain of Mrs. Booth or of her spiritual children.

ITS DANGERS.

The

Mr. Tucker's book in every page glows with her fiery earnestness. Having once conceived she had a mission to reform the world, Mrs. Booth set about the execution of her Divine commission. Believing that the Salvation