National Cathedral—not always iron dukes,
who, in the hats of beadles, and with the batons
of the ghosts in Hamlet and Don Giovanni,
point, for a bronze eternity, to some London
stableyard or skittle ground—but sometimes
it is a more ambitious monument—a column
that towers upward into the outer coating
of the metropolitan smoke, looking at a
distance like a high constable's staff of office, or
the ornamental pillar of a lamp for patent
candles. Two such columns as these are
among the architectural features of our city,
—the monument to Lord Nelson, and the
pillar of the Duke of York.

Standing in the iron cage that crowns the
summit of this latter structure, and directing
your eyes in a south-easterly direction to the
banks of the river, you may yet see another
circular column of greater altitude, but of
more homely exterior, built, in fact, of
unpretending brick, and surmounted by nothing
more ornamental than a bare flagstaff. This
is also a building dedicated to war, but it
bears the same relation to the Duke of York's
column as the private soldier does to the
Commander-in-chief,—the same relation to
the Nelson column, as the able seaman does
to the lord high admiral. It is the Lambeth
shot-tower, and if poetical justice had been
consulted instead of the adornment of the
metropolis, the statues of those distinguished
fighting men whom England delights to
honour should have been placed upon the
summit, and in niches round the interior of
this working monument, where the stream of
deadly shot, pouring from roof to basement,
with a leaden roar, would have gladdened
their marble eyes and ears, and hearts,
making a worthy Walhalla for their mighty
marble souls, even amongst the Bankside
wharves and timber yards. As it is, the
Lambeth shot-tower is in the peaceful
possession of Messrs. Walker, Parker, and
Company (by whose kind permission I have been
allowed to go over the works), and the
constant manufacture of the small, globular,
insidious instruments of death does not seem
to have had an unamiable effect either upon
masters, overlookers, or labourers.

Those who are curious in speculations on
the effect of certain employments upon the
mental and moral character of man, will
probably be glad to learn that the labourer
who is occupied for ten hours every day in
sharpening daggers and bayonets, or giving
the finishing edge to the chine-splitting sabre,
is a mild, an inoffensive creature in the
intervals of business; an affectionate
husband; and an indulgent father of a family.
Deadly revolvers are not put together in all
their fatal beauty by sour cynics who have
become weary of, or spiteful to the world, but
by hard-handed workmen, who laugh, sing
songs, and whistle tunes as they follow their
employment, and claim a fair day's wages
for what they consider a fair day's work.
The motley ingredients that go to make up
those engines of war that are known by the
titles of bombshells and hand-grenades, are
not mixed by crook-backed, grinning dwarfs
with grinding teeth, and aged, mumbling
crones with withered arms. Oh, no, my
Christian brethren, for these things—like all
things else—obey the universal law of supply
and demand. Machinery may intervene, and
remove the workman to a decent distance from
his labour, but grant the necessary stipend,
and pay it punctually, and you shall never
want for jovial, full-blooded men to obey your
bidding. And while one mass of fools are
determined to march against another mass of
fools for the avowed purpose of fire and
slaughter, who can grumble that they have
materials put into their hands with which to
kill each other in an artistic and
expeditious manner? Therefore, if any enthusiastic
and hot-headed members of the Peace
Society should ever think of marching bodily
against my friends of the shot-tower, I will
be one of the first to defend them and their
stronghold with all the physical power at my
command.

If ever I am to be sent suddenly into the
lap of eternity, let it be with my body nicely
beplumbed with the smooth, round, glossy shot
that I have seen manufactured at Lambeth,
and not—like some of my ancestors—with
my head split in two, like a water-melon,
by a clumsy battle-axe, or one of my eyes
knocked into my brain with a cloth yard
shaft. Let me—like Julius Caesar in the
forum—die decently; let me unlike—Julius
Caesar—have all the advantages of civilisation
assisting at my death, as developed in
the improvement of the engines of
destruction.

A most deceptive place is the shot-
department ol this Lambeth workshop. If the
emblem of peace is plenty—as the poets put
it—and the image of plenty—as the painters
put it, is a female scattering, right and left,
the seeds of golden corn, then must the shot-
tower and its warehouses be the very temple
of peace, for never did a place that was not a
granary, put on such a natural granarial
appearance.  If any member of that society that
I have before alluded to was brought here
blindfolded, and the bandage taken off when
he was in the midst of the sifters, and the
troughs of shot, he would immediately fancy
himself, without any stretch of imagination,
in the corn-market of Mark Lane, handling
his specimens of the finest agricultural
produce.  Canvas bags open at the top, and
full of the smooth, black, deadly grain, are
lying about, to aid in the illusion, which is
further assisted by the general cleanliness of
this department of the place.

Led by a steady, rushing noise, like the
sound of a great waterfall, I take the arm of
my imaginary friend from the Peace Society,
and in a few minutes we are standing inside
the base of the shot-tower. It is a few feet
higher than the monument on Fish Street