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Self Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance

by Samuel Smiles · English · Gutenberg #935 · 844,332 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Self Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance

Author: Samuel Smiles


        
Release date: June 1, 1997 [eBook #935]
                Most recently updated: January 29, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELF HELP; WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF CONDUCT AND PERSEVERANCE ***




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                                SELF HELP
                          WITH ILLUSTRATIONS OF
                        CONDUCT AND PERSEVERANCE.


                                * * * * *

                         BY SAMUEL SMILES, LL.D.,
                 AUTHOR OF “LIVES OF THE ENGINEERS,” ETC.

                                * * * * *

    “This above all,—To thine own self be true;
    And it must follow, as the night the day,
    Then canst not then be false to any man.”

                                                              SHAKESPEARE.

    “Might I give counsel to any young man, I would say to him, try
    to frequent the company of your betters.  In books and in life,
    that is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the
    great pleasure of life is that. Note what great men admired;
    they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely and
    worship meanly.”—W. M. THACKERAY.

                                * * * * *

                             POPULAR EDITION.

                                * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                      JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
                                  1897.




PREFACE.


THIS is a revised edition of a book which has already been received with
considerable favour at home and abroad.  It has been reprinted in various
forms in America; translations have appeared in Dutch and French, and
others are about to appear in German and Danish.  The book has,
doubtless, proved attractive to readers in different countries by reason
of the variety of anecdotal illustrations of life and character which it
contains, and the interest which all more or less feel in the labours,
the trials, the struggles, and the achievements of others.  No one can be
better aware than the author, of its fragmentary character, arising from
the manner in which it was for the most part originally composed,—having
been put together principally from jottings made during many
years,—intended as readings for young men, and without any view to
publication.  The appearance of this edition has furnished an opportunity
for pruning the volume of some superfluous matter, and introducing
various new illustrations, which will probably be found of general
interest.

In one respect the title of the book, which it is now too late to alter,
has proved unfortunate, as it has led some, who have judged it merely by
the title, to suppose that it consists of a eulogy of selfishness: the
very opposite of what it really is,—or at least of what the author
intended it to be.  Although its chief object unquestionably is to
stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to right
pursuits,—sparing neither labour, pains, nor self-denial in prosecuting
them,—and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon
the help or patronage of others, it will also be found, from the examples
given of literary and scientific men, artists, inventors, educators,
philanthropists, missionaries, and martyrs, that the duty of helping
one’s self in the highest sense involves the helping of one’s neighbours.

It has also been objected to the book that too much notice is taken in it
of men who have succeeded in life by helping themselves, and too little
of the multitude of men who have failed.  “Why should not Failure,” it
has been asked, “have its Plutarch as well as Success?”  There is,
indeed, no reason why Failure should not have its Plutarch, except that a
record of mere failure would probably be found excessively depressing as
well as uninstructive reading.  It is, however, shown in the following
pages that Failure is the best discipline of the true worker, by
stimulating him to renewed efforts, evoking his best powers, and carrying
him onward in self-culture, self-control, and growth in knowledge and
wisdom.  Viewed in this light, Failure, conquered by Perseverance, is
always full of interest and instruction, and this we have endeavoured to
illustrate by many examples.

As for Failure _per se_, although it may be well to find consolations for
it at the close of life, there is reason to doubt whether it is an object
that ought to be set before youth at the beginning of it.  Indeed, “how
_not_ to do it” is of all things the easiest learnt: it needs neither
teaching, effort, self-denial, industry, patience, perseverance, nor
judgment.  Besides, readers do not care to know about the general who
lost his battles, the engineer whose engines blew up, the architect who
designed only deformities, the painter who never got beyond daubs, the
schemer who did not invent his machine, the merchant who could not keep
out of the Gazette.  It is true, the best of men may fail, in the best of
causes.  But even these best of men did not try to fail, or regard their
failure as meritorious; on the contrary, they tried to succeed, and
looked upon failure as misfortune.  Failure in any good cause is,
however, honourable, whilst success in any bad cause is merely infamous.
At the same time success in the good cause is unquestionably better than
failure.  But it is not the result in any case that is to be regarded so
much as the aim and the effort, the patience, the courage, and the
endeavour with which desirable and worthy objects are pursued;—

    “’Tis not in mortals to command success;
    We will do more—deserve it.”

The object of the book briefly is, to re-inculcate these old-fashioned
but wholesome lessons—which perhaps cannot be too often urged,—that youth
must work in order to enjoy,—that nothing creditable can be accomplished
without application and diligence,—that the student must not be daunted
by difficulties, but conquer them by patience and perseverance,—and that,
above all, he must seek elevation of character, without which capacity is
worthless and worldly success is naught.  If the author has not succeeded
in illustrating these lessons, he can only say that he has failed in his
object.

Among the new passages introduced in the present edition, may be
mentioned the following:—Illustrious Foreigners of humble origin (pp.
10–12), French Generals and Marshals risen from the ranks (14), De
Tocqueville and Mutual Help (24), William Lee, M.A., and the
Stocking-loom (42), John Heathcoat, M.P., and the Bobbin-net machine
(47), Jacquard and his Loom (55), Vaucanson (58), Joshua Heilmann and the
Combing-machine (62), Bernard Palissy and his struggles (69), Böttgher,
discoverer of Hard Porcelain (80), Count de Buffon as Student (104),
Cuvier (128), Ambrose Paré (134), Claud Lorraine (160), Jacques Callot
(162), Benvenuto Cellini (164), Nicholas Poussin (168), Ary Scheffer
(171), the Strutts of Belper (214), Francis Xavier (238), Napoleon as a
man of business (276), Intrepidity of Deal Boatmen (400), besides
numerous other passages which it is unnecessary to specify.

_London_, _May_, 1866.




INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION.


THE origin of this book may be briefly told.

Some fifteen years since, the author was requested to deliver an address
before the members of some evening classes, which had been formed in a
northern town for mutual improvement, under the following circumstances:—

Two or three young men of the humblest rank resolved to meet in the
winter evenings, for the purpose of improving themselves by exchanging
knowledge with each other.  Their first meetings were held in the room of
a cottage in which one of the members lived; and, as others shortly
joined them, the place soon became inconveniently filled.  When summer
set in, they adjourned to the cottage garden outside; and the classes
were then held in the open air, round a little boarded hut used as a
garden-house, in which those who officiated as teachers set the sums, and
gave forth the lessons of the evening.  When the weather was fine, the
youths might be seen, until a late hour, hanging round the door of the
hut like a cluster of bees; but sometimes a sudden shower of rain would
dash the sums from their slates, and disperse them for the evening
unsatisfied.

Winter, with its cold nights, was drawing near, and what were they to do
for shelter?  Their numbers had by this time so increased, that no room
of an ordinary cottage could accommodate them.  Though they were for the
most part young men earning comparatively small weekly wages, they
resolved to incur the risk of hiring a room; and, on making inquiry, they
found a large dingy apartment to let, which had been used as a temporary
Cholera Hospital.  No tenant could be found for the place, which was
avoided as if the plague still clung to it.  But the mutual improvement
youths, nothing daunted, hired the cholera room at so much a week, lit it
up, placed a few benches and a deal table in it, and began their winter
classes.  The place soon presented a busy and cheerful appearance in the
evenings.  The teaching may have been, as no doubt it was, of a very rude
and imperfect sort; but it was done with a will.  Those who knew a little
taught those who knew less—improving themselves while they improved the
others; and, at all events, setting before them a good working example.
Thus these youths—and there were also grown men amongst them—proceeded to
teach themselves and each other, reading and writing, arithmetic and
geography; and even mathematics, chemistry, and some of the modern
languages.

About a hundred young men had thus come together, when, growing
ambitious, they desired to have lectures delivered to them; and then it
was that the author became acquainted with their proceedings.  A party of
them waited on him, for the purpose of inviting him to deliver an
introductory address, or, as they expressed it, “to talk to them a bit;”
prefacing the request by a modest statement of what they had done and
what they were doing.  He could not fail to be touched by the admirable
self-helping spirit which they had displayed; and, though entertaining
but slight faith in popular lecturing, he felt that a few words of
encouragement, honestly and sincerely uttered, might not be without some
good effect.  And in this spirit he addressed them on more than one
occasion, citing examples of what other men had done, as illustrations of
what each might, in a greater or less degree, do for himself; and
pointing out that their happiness and well-being as individuals in after
life, must necessarily depend mainly upon themselves—upon their own
diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control—and, above all,
on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the
glory of manly character.

There was nothing in the slightest degree new or original in this
counsel, which was as old as the Proverbs of Solomon, and possibly quite
as familiar.  But old-fashioned though the advice may have been, it was
welcomed.  The youths went forward in their course; worked on with energy
and resolution; and, reaching manhood, they went forth in various
directions into the world, where many of them now occupy positions of
trust and usefulness.  Several years after the incidents referred to, the
subject was unexpectedly recalled to the author’s recollection by an
evening visit from a young man—apparently fresh from the work of a
foundry—who explained that he was now an employer of labour and a
thriving man; and he was pleased to remember with gratitude the words
spoken in all honesty to him and to his fellow-pupils years before, and
even to attribute some measure of his success in life to the endeavours
which he had made to work up to their spirit.

The author’s personal interest having in this way been attracted to the
subject of Self-Help, he was accustomed to add to the memoranda from
which he had addressed these young men; and to note down occasionally in
his leisure evening moments, after the hours of business, the results of
such reading, observation, and experience of life, as he conceived to
bear upon it.  One of the most prominent illustrations cited in his
earlier addresses, was that of George Stephenson, the engineer; and the
original interest of the subject, as well as the special facilities and
opportunities which the author possessed for illustrating Mr.
Stephenson’s life and career, induced him to prosecute it at his leisure,
and eventually to publish his biography.  The present volume is written
in a similar spirit, as it has been similar in its origin.  The
illustrative sketches of character introduced, are, however, necessarily
less elaborately treated—being busts rather than full-length portraits,
and, in many of the cases, only some striking feature has been noted; the
lives of individuals, as indeed of nations, often concentrating their
lustre and interest in a few passages.  Such as the book is, the author
now leaves it in the hands of the reader; in the hope that the lessons of
industry, perseverance, and self-culture, which it contains, will be
found useful and instructive, as well as generally interesting.

_London_, _September_, 1859.




CONTENTS.

                              CHAPTER I.

                  SELF-HELP—NATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL.
Spirit of Self-Help—Institutions and men—Government a             Page
reflex of the individualism of a nation—Cæsarism and              1–26
Self-Help—William Dargan on Independence—Patient
labourers in all ranks—Self-Help a feature in the
English character—Power of example and of work in
practical education—Value of biographies—Great men
belong to no exclusive class or rank—Illustrious men
sprung from the ranks—Shakespeare—Various humble
origin of many eminent men—Distinguished
astronomers—Eminent sons of clergymen—Of
attorneys—Illustrious foreigners of humble
origin—Vauquelin, the chemist—Promotions from the
ranks in the French army—Instances of persevering
application and energy—Joseph Brotherton—W. J. Fox—W.
S. Lindsay—William Jackson—Richard Cobden—Diligence
indispensable to usefulness and distinction—The
wealthier ranks not all idlers—Examples—Military
men—Philosophers—Men of science—Politicians—Literary
men—Sir Robert Peel—Lord
Brougham—Lytton—Disraeli—Wordsworth on
self-reliance—De Tocqueville: his industry and
recognition of the help of others—Men their own best
helpers
                             CHAPTER II.

             LEADERS OF INDUSTRY—INVENTORS AND PRODUCERS.
Industry of the English people—Work the best                     27–66
educator—Hugh Miller—Poverty and toil not
insurmountable obstacles—Working men as
inventors—Invention of the steam-engine—James Watt:
his industry and habit of attention—Matthew
Boulton—Applications of the steam-engine—The Cotton
manufacture—The early inventors—Paul and
Highs—Arkwright: his early life—Barber, inventor and
manufacturer—His influence and character—The Peels of
South Lancashire—The founder of the family—The first
Sir Robert Peel, cotton-printer—Lady Peel—Rev. William
Lee, inventor of the stocking-frame—Dies abroad in
misery—James Lee—The Nottingham lace manufacture—John
Heathcoat, inventor of the bobbin-net machine—His
early life, his ingenuity, and plodding
perseverance—Invention of his machine—Anecdote of Lord
Lyndhurst—Progress of the lace-trade—Heathcoat’s
machines destroyed by the Luddites—His
character—Jacquard: his inventions and
adventures—Vaucanson: his mechanical genius,
improvements in silk manufacture—Jacquard improves
Vaucanson’s machine—The Jacquard loom adopted—Joshua
Heilmann, inventor of the combing-machine—History of
the invention—Its value
                             CHAPTER III.

          THREE GREAT POTTERS—PALLISSY, BÖTTGHER, WEDGWOOD.
Ancient pottery—Etruscan ware—Luca della Robbia, the             67–93
Florentine sculptor: re-discovers the art of
enamelling—Bernard Pallissy: sketch of his life and
labours—Inflamed by the sight of an Italian cup—His
search after the secret of the enamel—His experiments
during years of unproductive toil—His personal and
family privations—Indomitable perseverance, burns his
furniture to heat the furnace, and success at
last—Reduced to destitution—Condemned to death, and
release—His writings—Dies in the Bastille—John
Frederick Böttgher, the Berlin ‘gold cook’—His trick
in alchemy and consequent troubles—Flight into
Saxony—His detention at Dresden—Discovers how to make
red and white porcelain—The manufacture taken up by
the Saxon Government—Böttgher treated as a prisoner
and a slave—His unhappy end—The Sèvres porcelain
manufactory—Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter—Early
state of English earthenware manufacture—Wedgwood’s
indefatigable industry, skill, and perseverance—His
success—The Barberini vase—Wedgwood a national
benefactor—Industrial heroes
                             CHAPTER IV.

                    APPLICATION AND PERSEVERANCE.
Great results attained by simple means—Fortune favours          94–117
the industrious—“Genius is patience”—Newton and
Kepler—Industry of eminent men—Power acquired by
repeated effort—Anecdote of Sir Robert Peel’s
cultivation of memory—Facility comes by
practice—Importance of patience—Cheerfulness—Sydney
Smith—Dr. Hook—Hope an important element in
character—Carey the missionary—Anecdote of Dr.
Young—Anecdote of Audubon the ornithologist—Anecdote
of Mr. Carlyle and his MS. of the ‘French
Revolution’—Perseverance of Watt and
Stephenson—Perseverance displayed in the discovery of
the Nineveh marbles by Rawlinson and Layard—Comte de
Buffon as student—His continuous and unremitting
labours—Sir Walter Scott’s perseverance—John
Britton—Loudon—Samuel Drew—Joseph Hume
                              CHAPTER V.

             HELPS AND OPPORTUNITIES—SCIENTIFIC PURSUITS.
No great result achieved by accident—Newton’s                  118–153
discoveries—Dr. Young—Habit of observing with
intelligence—Galileo—Inventions of Brown, Watt, and
Brunel, accidentally suggested—Philosophy in little
things—Apollonius Pergæus and conic sections—Franklin
and Galvani—Discovery of steam power—Opportunities
seized or made—Simple and rude tools of great
workers—Lee and Stone’s opportunities for learning—Sir
Walter Scott’s—Dr. Priestly—Sir Humphry
Davy—Faraday—Davy and Coleridge—Cuvier—Dalton’s
industry—Examples of improvement of time—Daguesseau
and Bentham—Melancthon and Baxter—Writing down
observations—Great note-makers—Dr. Pye Smith—John
Hunter: his patient study of little things—His great
labours—Ambrose Paré the French
surgeon—Harvey—Jenner—Sir Charles Bell—Dr. Marshall
Hall—Sir William Herschel—William Smith the geologist:
his discoveries, his geological map—Hugh Miller: his
observant faculties—John Brown and Robert Dick,
geologists—Sir Roderick Murchison, his industry and
attainments
                             CHAPTER VI.

                           WORKERS IN ART.
Sir Joshua Reynolds on the power of industry in                154–201
art—Humble origin of eminent artists—Acquisition of
wealth not the ruling motive with artists—Michael
Angelo on riches—Patient labours of Michael Angelo and
Titian—West’s early success a disadvantage—Richard
Wilson and Zuccarelli—Sir Joshua Reynolds, Blake,
Bird, Gainsborough, and Hogarth, as boy
artists—Hogarth a keen observer—Banks and
Mulready—Claude Lorraine and Turner: their
indefatigable industry—Perrier and Jacques Callot and
their visits to Rome—Callot and the gipsies—Benvenuto
Cellini, goldsmith and musician: his ambition to
excel—Casting of his statue of Perseus—Nicolas
Poussin, a sedulous student and
worker—Duquesnoi—Poussin’s fame—Ary Scheffer: his
hindrances and success—John Flaxman: his genius and
perseverance—His brave wife—Their visit to
Rome—Francis Chantrey: his industry and energy—David
Wilkie and William Etty, unflagging workers—Privations
endured by artists—Martin—Pugin—George Kemp, architect
of the Scott monument—John Gibson, Robert Thorburn,
Noel Paton—James Sharples the blacksmith artist: his
autobiography—Industry of musicians—Handel, Haydn,
Beethoven, Bach, Meyerbeer—Dr. Arne—William Jackson
the self-taught composer
                             CHAPTER VII.

                      INDUSTRY AND THE PEERAGE.
The peerage fed from the industrial ranks—Fall of old          202–222
families: Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets—The
peerage comparatively modern—Peerages originating with
traders and merchants—Richard Foley, nailmaker,
founder of the Foley peerage—Adventurous career of
William Phipps, founder of the Normanby peerage: his
recovery of sunken treasure—Sir William Petty, founder
of the Lansdowne peerage—Jedediah Strutt, founder of
the Belper peerage—William and Edward Strutt—Naval and
Military peers—Peerages founded by lawyers—Lords
Tenterden and Campbell—Lord Eldon: his early struggles
and eventual success—Baron Langdale—Rewards of
perseverance
                            CHAPTER VIII.

                         ENERGY AND COURAGE.
Energy characteristic of the Teutonic race—The                 223–262
foundations of strength of character—Force of
purpose—Concentration—Courageous working—Words of Hugh
Miller and Fowell Buxton—Power and freedom of
will—Words of Lamennais—Suwarrow—Napoleon and
“glory”—Wellington and “duty”—Promptitude in
action—Energy displayed by the British in India—Warren
Hastings—Sir Charles Napier: his adventure with the
Indian swordsman—The rebellion in India—The
Lawrences—Nicholson—The siege of Delhi—Captain
Hodson—Missionary labourers—Francis Xavier’s missions
in the East—John Williams—Dr. Livingstone—John
Howard—Jonas Hanway: his career—The philanthropic
labours of Granville Sharp—Position of slaves in
England—Result of Sharp’s efforts—Clarkson’s
labours—Fowell Buxton: his resolute purpose and
energy—Abolition of slavery
                             CHAPTER IX.

                           MEN OF BUSINESS.
Hazlitt’s definition of the man of business—The chief          263–289
requisite qualities—Men of genius men of
business—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton,
Newton, Cowper, Wordsworth, Scott, Ricardo, Grote, J.
S. Mill—Labour and application necessary to
success—Lord Melbourne’s advice—The school of
difficulty a good school—Conditions of success in
Law—The industrious architect—The salutary influence
of work—Consequences of contempt for arithmetic—Dr.
Johnson on the alleged injustice of “the
world”—Washington Irving’s views—Practical qualities
necessary in business—Importance of accuracy—Charles
James Fox—Method—Richard Cecil and De Witt: their
despatch of business—Value of time—Sir Walter Scott’s
advice—Promptitude—Economy of
time—Punctuality—Firmness—Tact—Napoleon and Wellington
as men of business—Napoleon’s attention to details—The
‘Napoleon Correspondence’—Wellington’s business
faculty—Wellington in the Peninsula—“Honesty the best
policy”—Trade tries character—Dishonest gains—David
Barclay a model man of business
                              CHAPTER X.

                       MONEY—ITS USE AND ABUSE.
The right use of money a test of wisdom—The virtue of          290–313
self-denial—Self-imposed taxes—Economy necessary to
independence—Helplessness of the improvident—Frugality
an important public question—Counsels of Richard
Cobden and John Bright—The bondage of the
improvident—Independence attainable by working
men—Francis Horner’s advice from his father—Robert
Burns—Living within the means—Bacon’s
maxim—Wasters—Running into debt—Haydon’s
debts—Fichte—Dr. Johnson on debt—John Locke—The Duke
of Wellington on debt—Washington—Earl St. Vincent: his
protested bill—Joseph Hume on living too high—Ambition
after gentility—Napier’s order to his officers in
India—Resistance to temptation—Hugh Miller’s case—High
standard of life necessary—Proverbs on money-making
and thrift—Thomas Wright and the reclamation of
criminals—Mere money-making—John Foster—Riches no
proof of worth—All honest industry honourable—The
power of money over-estimated—Joseph Brotherton—True
Respectability—Lord Collingwood
                             CHAPTER XI.

              SELF-CULTURE—FACILITIES AND DIFFICULTIES.
Sir W. Scott and Sir B. Brodie on self-culture—Dr.             314–359
Arnold’s spirit—Active employment salutary—Malthus’s
advice to his son—Importance of physical
health—Hodson, of “Hodson’s Horse”—Dr. Channing—Early
labour—Training in use of tools—Healthiness of great
men—Sir Walter Scott’s athletic sports—Barrow, Fuller,
Clarke—Labour conquers all things—Words of Chatterton,
Ferguson, Stone, Drew—Well-directed labour—Opinions of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Fowell Buxton, Dr. Ross, F.
Horner, Loyola, and Lord St. Leonards—Thoroughness,
accuracy, decision, and promptitude—The virtue of
patient labour—The mischievous effects of “cramming”
in labour-saving processes and multifarious
reading—The right use of knowledge—Books may impart
learning, but well-applied knowledge and experience
only exhibit wisdom—The Magna Charta men—Brindley,
Stephenson, Hunter, and others, not book-learned yet
great—Self-respect—Jean Paul Richter—Knowledge as a
means of rising—Base views of the value of
knowledge—Ideas of Bacon and Southey—Douglas Jerrold
on comic literature—Danger of immoderate love of
pleasure—Benjamin Constant: his high thinking and low
living—Thierry: his noble character—Coleridge and
Southey—Robert Nicoll on Coleridge—Charles James Fox
on perseverance—The wisdom and strength acquired
through failure—Hunter, Rossini, Davy, Mendelssohn—The
uses of difficulty and adversity—Lyndhurst,
D’Alembert, Carissimi, Reynolds, and Henry Clay on
persistency—Curran on honest poverty—Struggles with
difficulties: Alexander Murray, William Chambers,
Cobbet—The French stonemason turned Professor—Sir
Samuel Romilly as a self-cultivator—John Leyden’s
perseverance—Professor Lee: his perseverance and his
attainments as a linguist—Late learners: Spelman,
Franklin, Dryden, Scott, Boccaccio, Arnold, and
others—Illustrious dunces: Generals Grant, Stonewall
Jackson, John Howard, Davy, and others—Story of a
dunce—Success depends on perseverance
                             CHAPTER XII.

                           EXAMPLE—MODELS.
Example a potent instructor—Influence of                       360–381
conduct—Parental example—All acts have their train of
consequences—Disraeli on Cobden—Words of Babbage—Human
responsibility—Every person owes a good example to
others—Doing, not saying—Mrs. Chisholm—Dr. Guthrie and
John Pounds—Good models of conduct—The company of our
betters—Francis Horner’s views on personal
intercourse—The Marquis of Lansdowne and
Malesherbes—Fowell Buxton and the Gurney
family—Personal influence of John Sterling—Influence
of artistic genius upon others—Example of the brave an
inspiration to the timid—Biography valuable as forming
high models of character—Lives influenced by
biography—Romilly, Franklin, Drew, Alfieri, Loyola,
Wolff, Horner, Reynolds—Examples of cheerfulness—Dr.
Arnold’s influence over others—Career of Sir John
Sinclair
                            CHAPTER XIII.

                    CHARACTER—THE TRUE GENTLEMAN.
Character a man’s best possession—Character of Francis         382–408
Horner—Franklin—Character is power—The higher
qualities of character—Lord Erskine’s rules of
conduct—A high standard of life
necessary—Truthfulness—Wellington’s character of
Peel—Be what you seem—Integrity and honesty of
action—Importance of habits—Habits constitute
character—Growth of habit in youth—Words of Robertson
of Brighton—Manners and morals—Civility and
kindness—Anecdote of Abernethy—True
politeness—Great-hearted men of no exclusive rank or
class—William and Charles Grant, the “Brothers
Cheeryble”—The true gentleman—Lord Edward
Fitzgerald—Honour, probity, rectitude—The gentleman
will not be bribed—Anecdotes of Hanway, Wellington,
Wellesley, and Sir C. Napier—The poor in purse may be
rich in spirit—A noble peasant—Intrepidity of Deal
boatmen—Anecdotes of the Emperor of Austria and of two
English navvies—Truth makes the success of the
gentleman—Courage and gentleness—Gentlemen in
India—Outram, Henry Lawrence—Lord Clyde—The private
soldiers at Agra—The wreck of the _Birkenhead_—Use of
power, the test of the Gentleman—Sir Ralph
Abercrombie—Fuller’s character of Sir Francis Drake




CHAPTER I.
SELF-HELP—NATIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL.


    “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the
    individuals composing it.”—_J. S. Mill_.

    “We put too much faith in systems, and look too little to men.”—_B.
    Disraeli_.

“HEAVEN helps those who help themselves” is a well-tried maxim, embodying
in a small compass the results of vast human experience.  The spirit of
self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and,
exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of
national vigour and strength.  Help from without is often enfeebling in
its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.  Whatever is
done _for_ men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus
and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to
over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render
them comparatively helpless.

Even the best institutions can give a man no active help.  Perhaps the
most they can do is, to leave him free to develop himself and improve his
individual condition.  But in all times men have been prone to believe
that their happiness and well-being were to be secured by means of
institutions rather than by their own conduct.  Hence the value of
legislation as an agent in human advancement has usually been much
over-estimated.  To constitute the millionth part of a Legislature, by
voting for one or two men once in three or five years, however
conscientiously this duty may be performed, can exercise but little
active influence upon any man’s life and character.  Moreover, it is
every day becoming more clearly understood, that the function of
Government is negative and restrictive, rather than positive and active;
being resolvable principally into protection—protection of life, liberty,
and property.  Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the
enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a
comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent,
can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken
sober.  Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action,
economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater
rights.

The Government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflex
of the individuals composing it.  The Government that is ahead of the
people will inevitably be dragged down to their level, as the Government
that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up.  In the order of
nature, the collective character of a nation will as surely find its
befitting results in its law and government, as water finds its own
level.  The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and
corrupt ignobly.  Indeed all experience serves to prove that the worth
and strength of a State depend far less upon the form of its institutions
than upon the character of its men.  For the nation is only an aggregate
of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of
the personal improvement of the men, women, and children of whom society
is composed.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and
uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness,
and vice.  What we are accustomed to decry as great social evils, will,
for the most part, be found to be but the outgrowth of man’s own
perverted life; and though we may endeavour to cut them down and
extirpate them by means of Law, they will only spring up again with fresh
luxuriance in some other form, unless the conditions of personal life and
character are radically improved.  If this view be correct, then it
follows that the highest patriotism and philanthropy consist, not so much
in altering laws and modifying institutions, as in helping and
stimulating men to elevate and improve themselves by their own free and
independent individual action.

It may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from
without, whilst everything depends upon how he governs himself from
within.  The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great
though that evil be, but he who is the thrall of his own moral ignorance,
selfishness, and vice.  Nations who are thus enslaved at heart cannot be
freed by any mere changes of masters or of institutions; and so long as
the fatal delusion prevails, that liberty solely depends upon and
consists in government, so long will such changes, no matter at what cost
they may be effected, have as little practical and lasting result as the
shifting of the figures in a phantasmagoria.  The solid foundations of
liberty must rest upon individual character; which is also the only sure
guarantee for social security and national progress.  John Stuart Mill
truly observes that “even despotism does not produce its worst effects so
long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality
_is_ despotism, by whatever name it be called.”

Old fallacies as to human progress are constantly turning up.  Some call
for Cæsars, others for Nationalities, and others for Acts of Parliament.
We are to wait for Cæsars, and when they are found, “happy the people who
recognise and follow them.” {4}  This doctrine shortly means, everything
_for_ the people, nothing _by_ them,—a doctrine which, if taken as a
guide, must, by destroying the free conscience of a community, speedily
prepare the way for any form of despotism.  Cæsarism is human idolatry in
its worst form—a worship of mere power, as degrading in its effects as
the worship of mere wealth would be.  A far healthier doctrine to
inculcate among the nations would be that of Self-Help; and so soon as it
is thoroughly understood and carried into action, Cæsarism will be no
more.  The two principles are directly antagonistic; and what Victor Hugo
said of the Pen and the Sword alike applies to them, “Ceci tuera cela.”
[This will kill that.]

The power of Nationalities and Acts of Parliament is also a prevalent
superstition.  What William Dargan, one of Ireland’s truest patriots,
said at the closing of the first Dublin Industrial Exhibition, may well
be quoted now.  “To tell the truth,” he said, “I never heard the word
independence mentioned that my own country and my own fellow townsmen did
not occur to my mind.  I have heard a great deal about the independence
that we were to get from this, that, and the other place, and of the
great expectations we were to have from persons from other countries
coming amongst us.  Whilst I value as much as any man the great
advantages that must result to us from that intercourse, I have always
been deeply impressed with the feeling that our industrial independence
is dependent upon ourselves.  I believe that with simple industry and
careful exactness in the utilization of our energies, we never had a
fairer chance nor a brighter prospect than the present.  We have made a
step, but perseverance is the great agent of success; and if we but go on
zealously, I believe in my conscience that in a short period we shall
arrive at a position of equal comfort, of equal happiness, and of equal
independence, with that of any other people.”

All nations have been made what they are by the thinking and the working
of many generations of men.  Patient and persevering labourers in all
ranks and conditions of life, cultivators of the soil and explorers of
the mine, inventors and discoverers, manufacturers, mechanics and
artisans, poets, philosophers, and politicians, all have contributed
towards the grand result, one generation building upon another’s labours,
and carrying them forward to still higher stages.  This constant
succession of noble workers—the artisans of civilisation—has served to
create order out of chaos in industry, science, and art; and the living
race has thus, in the course of nature, become the inheritor of the rich
estate provided by the skill and industry of our forefathers, which is
placed in our hands to cultivate, and to hand down, not only unimpaired
but improved, to our successors.

The spirit of self-help, as exhibited in the energetic action of
individuals, has in all times been a marked feature in the English
character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation.
Rising above the heads of the mass, there were always to be found a
series of individuals distinguished beyond others, who commanded the
public homage.  But our progress has also been owing to multitudes of
smaller and less known men.  Though only the generals’ names may be
remembered in the history of any great campaign, it has been in a great
measure through the individual valour and heroism of the privates that
victories have been won.  And life, too, is “a soldiers’ battle,”—men in
the ranks having in all times been amongst the greatest of workers.  Many
are the lives of men unwritten, which have nevertheless as powerfully
influenced civilisation and progress as the more fortunate Great whose
names are recorded in biography.  Even the humblest person, who sets
before his fellows an example of industry, sobriety, and upright honesty
of purpose in life, has a present as well as a future influence upon the
well-being of his country; for his life and character pass unconsciously
into the lives of others, and propagate good example for all time to
come.

Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces
the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really
constitutes the best practical education.  Schools, academies, and
colleges, give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with
it.  Far more influential is the life-education daily given in our homes,
in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the
plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of
men.  This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which
Schiller designated “the education of the human race,” consisting in
action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,—all that tends to discipline
a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and
business of life,—a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or
acquired by any amount of mere literary training.  With his usual weight
of words Bacon observes, that “Studies teach not their own use; but that
is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation;” a remark
that holds true of actual life, as well as of the cultivation of the
intellect itself.  For all experience serves to illustrate and enforce
the lesson, that a man perfects himself by work more than by
reading,—that it is life rather than literature, action rather than
study, and character rather than biography, which tend perpetually to
renovate mankind.

Biographies of great, but especially of good men, are nevertheless most
instructive and useful, as helps, guides, and incentives to others.  Some
of the best are almost equivalent to gospels—teaching high living, high
thinking, and energetic action for their own and the world’s good.  The
valuable examples which they furnish of the power of self-help, of
patient purpose, resolute working, and steadfast integrity, issuing in
the formation of truly noble and manly character, exhibit in language not
to be misunderstood, what it is in the power of each to accomplish for
himself; and eloquently illustrate the efficacy of self-respect and
self-reliance in enabling men of even the humblest rank to work out for
themselves an honourable competency and a solid reputation.

Great men of science, literature, and art—apostles of great thoughts and
lords of the great heart—have belonged to no exclusive class nor rank in
life.  They have come alike from colleges, workshops, and
farmhouses,—from the huts of poor men and the mansions of the rich.  Some
of God’s greatest apostles have come from “the ranks.”  The poorest have
sometimes taken the highest places; nor have difficulties apparently the
most insuperable proved obstacles in their way.  Those very difficulties,
in many instances, would ever seem to have been their best helpers, by
evoking their powers of labour and endurance, and stimulating into life
faculties which might otherwise have lain dormant.  The instances of
obstacles thus surmounted, and of triumphs thus achieved, are indeed so
numerous, as almost to justify the proverb that “with Will one can do
anything.”  Take, for instance, the remarkable fact, that from the
barber’s shop came Jeremy Taylor, the most poetical of divines; Sir
Richard Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of the
cotton manufacture; Lord Tenterden, one of the most distinguished of Lord
Chief Justices; and Turner, the greatest among landscape painters.

No one knows to a certainty what Shakespeare was; but it is
unquestionable that he sprang from a humble rank.  His father was a
butcher and grazier; and Shakespeare himself is supposed to have been in
early life a woolcomber; whilst others aver that he was an usher in a
school and afterwards a scrivener’s clerk.  He truly seems to have been
“not one, but all mankind’s epitome.”  For such is the accuracy of his
sea phrases that a naval writer alleges that he must have been a sailor;
whilst a clergyman infers, from internal evidence in his writings, that
he was probably a parson’s clerk; and a distinguished judge of
horse-flesh insists that he must have been a horse-dealer.  Shakespeare
was certainly an actor, and in the course of his life “played many
parts,” gathering his wonderful stores of knowledge from a wide field of
experience and observation.  In any event, he must have been a close
student and a hard worker; and to this day his writings continue to
exercise a powerful influence on the formation of English character.

The common class of day labourers has given us Brindley the engineer,
Cook the navigator, and Burns the poet.  Masons and bricklayers can boast
of Ben Jonson, who worked at the building of Lincoln’s Inn, with a trowel
in his hand and a book in his pocket, Edwards and Telford the engineers,
Hugh Miller the geologist, and Allan Cunningham the writer and sculptor;
whilst among distinguished carpenters we find the names of Inigo Jones
the architect, Harrison the chronometer-maker, John Hunter the
physiologist, Romney and Opie the painters, Professor Lee the
Orientalist, and John Gibson the sculptor.

From the weaver class have sprung Simson the mathematician, Bacon the
sculptor, the two Milners, Adam Walker, John Foster, Wilson the
ornithologist, Dr. Livingstone the missionary traveller, and Tannahill
the poet.  Shoemakers have given us Sir Cloudesley Shovel the great
Admiral, Sturgeon the electrician, Samuel Drew the essayist, Gifford the
editor of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Bloomfield the poet, and William Carey
the missionary; whilst Morrison, another laborious missionary, was a
maker of shoe-lasts.  Within the last few years, a profound naturalist
has been discovered in the person of a shoemaker at Banff, named Thomas
Edwards, who, while maintaining himself by his trade, has devoted his
leisure to the study of natural science in all its branches, his
researches in connexion with the smaller crustaceæ having been rewarded
by the discovery of a new species, to which the name of “Praniza
Edwardsii” has been given by naturalists.

Nor have tailors been undistinguished.  John Stow, the historian, worked
at the trade during some part of his life.  Jackson, the painter, made
clothes until he reached manhood.  The brave Sir John Hawkswood, who so
greatly distinguished himself at Poictiers, and was knighted by Edward
III. for his valour, was in early life apprenticed to a London tailor.
Admiral Hobson, who broke the boom at Vigo in 1702, belonged to the same
calling.  He was working as a tailor’s apprentice near Bonchurch, in the
Isle of Wight, when the news flew through the village that a squadron of
men-of-war was sailing off the island.  He sprang from the shopboard, and
ran down with his comrades to the beach, to gaze upon the glorious sight.
The boy was suddenly inflamed with the ambition to be a sailor; and
springing into a boat, he rowed off to the squadron, gained the admiral’s
ship, and was accepted as a volunteer.  Years after, he returned to his
native village full of honours, and dined off bacon and eggs in the
cottage where he had worked as an apprentice.  But the greatest tailor of
all is unquestionably Andrew Johnson, the present President of the United
States—a man of extraordinary force of character and vigour of intellect.
In his great speech at Washington, when describing himself as having
begun his political career as an alderman, and run through all the
branches of the legislature, a voice in the crowd cried, “From a tailor
up.”  It was characteristic of Johnson to take the intended sarcasm in
good part, and even to turn it to account.  “Some gentleman says I have
been a tailor.  That does not disconcert me in the least; for when I was
a tailor I had the reputation of being a good one, and making close fits;
I was always punctual with my customers, and always did good work.”

Cardinal Wolsey, De Foe, Akenside, and Kirke White were the sons of
butchers; Bunyan was a tinker, and Joseph Lancaster a basket-maker.
Among the great names identified with the invention of the steam-engine
are those of Newcomen, Watt, and Stephenson; the first a blacksmith, the
second a maker of mathematical instruments, and the third an
engine-fireman.  Huntingdon the preacher was originally a coalheaver, and
Bewick, the father of wood-engraving, a coalminer.  Dodsley was a
footman, and Holcroft a groom.  Baffin the navigator began his seafaring
career as a man before the mast, and Sir Cloudesley Shovel as a
cabin-boy.  Herschel played the oboe in a military band.  Chantrey was a
journeyman carver, Etty a journeyman printer, and Sir Thomas Lawrence the
son of a tavern-keeper.  Michael Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, was in
early life apprenticed to a bookbinder, and worked at that trade until he
reached his twenty-second year: he now occupies the very first rank as a
philosopher, excelling even his master, Sir Humphry Davy, in the art of
lucidly expounding the most difficult and abstruse points in natural
science.

Among those who have given the greatest impulse to the sublime science of
astronomy, we find Copernicus, the son of a Polish baker; Kepler, the son
of a German public-house keeper, and himself the “garçon de cabaret;”
d’Alembert, a foundling picked up one winter’s night on the steps of the
church of St. Jean le Rond at Paris, and brought up by the wife of a
glazier; and Newton and Laplace, the one the son of a small freeholder
near Grantham, the other the son of a poor peasant of Beaumont-en-Auge,
near Honfleur.  Notwithstanding their comparatively adverse circumstances
in early life, these distinguished men achieved a solid and enduring
reputation by the exercise of their genius, which all the wealth in the
world could not have purchased.  The very possession of wealth might
indeed have proved an obstacle greater even than the humble means to
which they were born.  The father of Lagrange, the astronomer and
mathematician, held the office of Treasurer of War at Turin; but having
ruined himself by speculations, his family were reduced to comparative
poverty.  To this circumstance Lagrange was in after life accustomed
partly to attribute his own fame and happiness.  “Had I been rich,” said
he, “I should probably not have become a mathematician.”

The sons of clergymen and ministers of religion generally, have
particularly distinguished themselves in our country’s history.  Amongst
them we find the names of Drake and Nelson, celebrated in naval heroism;
of Wollaston, Young, Playfair, and Bell, in science; of Wren, Reynolds,
Wilson, and Wilkie, in art; of Thurlow and Campbell, in law; and of
Addison, Thomson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, and Tennyson, in literature.
Lord Hardinge, Colonel Edwardes, and Major Hodson, so honourably known in
Indian warfare, were also the sons of clergymen.  Indeed, the empire of
England in India was won and held chiefly by men of the middle class—such
as Clive, Warren Hastings, and their successors—men for the most part
bred in factories and trained to habits of business.

Among the sons of attorneys we find Edmund Burke, Smeaton the engineer,
Scott and Wordsworth, and Lords Somers, Hardwick, and Dunning.  Sir
William Blackstone was the posthumous son of a silk-mercer.  Lord
Gifford’s father was a grocer at Dover; Lord Denman’s a physician; judge
Talfourd’s a country brewer; and Lord Chief Baron Pollock’s a celebrated
saddler at Charing Cross.  Layard, the discoverer of the monuments of
Nineveh, was an articled clerk in a London solicitor’s office; and Sir
William Armstrong, the inventor of hydraulic machinery and of the
Armstrong ordnance, was also trained to the law and practised for some
time as an attorney.  Milton was the son of a London scrivener, and Pope
and Southey were the sons of linendrapers.  Professor Wilson was the son
of a Paisley manufacturer, and Lord Macaulay of an African merchant.
Keats was a druggist, and Sir Humphry Davy a country apothecary’s
apprentice.  Speaking of himself, Davy once said, “What I am I have made
myself: I say this without vanity, and in pure simplicity of heart.”
Richard Owen, the Newton of Natural History, began life as a midshipman,
and did not enter upon the line of scientific research in which he has
since become so distinguished, until comparatively late in life.  He laid
the foundations of his great knowledge while occupied in cataloguing the
magnificent museum accumulated by the industry of John Hunter, a work
which occupied him at the College of Surgeons during a period of about
ten years.

Foreign not less than English biography abounds in illustrations of men
who have glorified the lot of poverty by their labours and their genius.
In Art we find Claude, the son of a pastrycook; Geefs, of a baker;
Leopold Robert, of a watchmaker; and Haydn, of a wheelwright; whilst
Daguerre was a scene-painter at the Opera.  The father of Gregory VII.
was a carpenter; of Sextus V., a shepherd; and of Adrian VI., a poor
bargeman.  When a boy, Adrian, unable to pay for a light by which to
study, was accustomed to prepare his lessons by the light of the lamps in
the streets and the church porches, exhibiting a degree of patience and
industry which were the certain forerunners of his future distinction.
Of like humble origin were Hauy, the mineralogist, who was the son of a
weaver of Saint-Just; Hautefeuille, the mechanician, of a baker at
Orleans; Joseph Fourier, the mathematician, of a tailor at Auxerre;
Durand, the architect, of a Paris shoemaker; and Gesner, the naturalist,
of a skinner or worker in hides, at Zurich.  This last began his career
under all the disadvantages attendant on poverty, sickness, and domestic
calamity; none of which, however, were sufficient to damp his courage or
hinder his progress.  His life was indeed an eminent illustration of the
truth of the saying, that those who have most to do and are willing to
work, will find the most time.  Pierre Ramus was another man of like
character.  He was the son of poor parents in Picardy, and when a boy was
employed to tend sheep.  But not liking the occupation he ran away to
Paris.  After encountering much misery, he succeeded in entering the
College of Navarre as a servant.  The situation, however, opened for him
the road to learning, and he shortly became one of the most distinguished
men of his time.

The chemist Vauquelin was the son of a peasant of Saint-André-d’Herbetot,
in the Calvados.  When a boy at school, though poorly clad, he was full
of bright intelligence; and the master, who taught him to read and write,
when praising him for his diligence, used to say, “Go on, my boy; work,
study, Colin, and one day you will go as well dressed as the parish
churchwarden!”  A country apothecary who visited the school, admired the
robust boy’s arms, and offered to take him into his laboratory to pound
his drugs, to which Vauquelin assented, in the hope of being able to
continue his lessons.  But the apothecary would not permit him to spend
any part of his time in learning; and on ascertaining this, the youth
immediately determined to quit his service.  He therefore left
Saint-André and took the road for Paris with his havresac on his back.
Arrived there, he searched for a place as apothecary’s boy, but could not
find one.  Worn out by fatigue and destitution, Vauquelin fell ill, and
in that state was taken to the hospital, where he thought he should die.
But better things were in store for the poor boy.  He recovered, and
again proceeded in his search of employment, which he at length found
with an apothecary.  Shortly after, he became known to Fourcroy the
eminent chemist, who was so pleased with the youth that he made him his
private secretary; and many years after, on the death of that great
philosopher, Vauquelin succeeded him as Professor of Chemistry.  Finally,
in 1829, the electors of the district of Calvados appointed him their
representative in the Chamber of Deputies, and he re-entered in triumph
the village which he had left so many years before, so poor and so
obscure.

England has no parallel instances to show, of promotions from the ranks
of the army to the highest military offices; which have been so common in
France since the first Revolution.  “La carrière ouverte aux talents” has
there received many striking illustrations, which would doubtless be
matched among ourselves were the road to promotion as open.  Hoche,
Humbert, and Pichegru, began their respective careers as private
soldiers.  Hoche, while in the King’s army, was accustomed to embroider
waistcoats to enable him to earn money wherewith to purchase books on
military science.  Humbert was a scapegrace when a youth; at sixteen he
ran away from home, and was by turns servant to a tradesman at Nancy, a
workman at Lyons, and a hawker of rabbit skins.  In 1792, he enlisted as
a volunteer; and in a year he was general of brigade.  Kleber, Lefèvre,
Suchet, Victor, Lannes, Soult, Massena, St. Cyr, D’Erlon, Murat,
Augereau, Bessières, and Ney, all rose from the ranks.  In some cases
promotion was rapid, in others it was slow.  Saint Cyr, the son of a
tanner of Toul, began life as an actor, after which he enlisted in the
Chasseurs, and was promoted to a captaincy within a year.  Victor, Duc de
Belluno, enlisted in the Artillery in 1781: during the events preceding
the Revolution he was discharged; but immediately on the outbreak of war
he re-enlisted, and in the course of a few months his intrepidity and
ability secured his promotion as Adjutant-Major and chief of battalion.
Murat, “le beau sabreur,” was the son of a village innkeeper in Perigord,
where he looked after the horses.  He first enlisted in a regiment of
Chasseurs, from which he was dismissed for insubordination: but again
enlisting, he shortly rose to the rank of Colonel.  Ney enlisted at
eighteen in a hussar regiment, and gradually advanced step by step:
Kleber soon discovered his merits, surnaming him “The Indefatigable,” and
promoted him to be Adjutant-General when only twenty-five.  On the other
hand, Soult {15} was six years from the date of his enlistment before he
reached the rank of sergeant.  But Soult’s advancement was rapid compared
with that of Massena, who served for fourteen years before he was made
sergeant; and though he afterwards rose successively, step by step, to
the grades of Colonel, General of Division, and Marshal, he declared that
the post of sergeant was the step which of all others had cost him the
most labour to win.  Similar promotions from the ranks, in the French
army, have continued down to our own day.  Changarnier entered the King’s
bodyguard as a private in 1815.  Marshal Bugeaud served four years in the
ranks, after which he was made an officer.  Marshal Randon, the present
French Minister of War, began his military career as a drummer boy; and
in the portrait of him in the gallery at Versailles, his hand rests upon
a drum-head, the picture being thus painted at his own request.
Instances such as these inspire French soldiers with enthusiasm for their
service, as each private feels that he may possibly carry the baton of a
marshal in his knapsack.

The instances of men, in this and other countries, who, by dint of
persevering application and energy, have raised themselves from the
humblest ranks of industry to eminent positions of usefulness and
influence in society, are indeed so numerous that they have long ceased
to be regarded as exceptional.  Looking at some of the more remarkable,
it might almost be said that early encounter with difficulty and adverse
circumstances was the necessary and indispensable condition of success.
The British House of Commons has always contained a considerable number
of such self-raised men—fitting representatives of the industrial
character of the people; and it is to the credit of our Legislature that
they have been welcomed and honoured there.  When the late Joseph
Brotherton, member for Salford, in the course of the discussion on the
Ten Hours Bill, detailed with true pathos the hardships and fatigues to
which he had been subjected when working as a factory boy in a cotton
mill, and described the resolution which he had then formed, that if ever
it was in his power he would endeavour to ameliorate the condition of
that class, Sir James Graham rose immediately after him, and declared,
amidst the cheers of the House, that he did not before know that Mr.
Brotherton’s origin had been so humble, but that it rendered him more
proud than he had ever before been of the House of Commons, to think that
a person risen from that condition should be able to sit side by side, on
equal terms, with the hereditary gentry of the land.

The late Mr. Fox, member for Oldham, was accustomed to introduce his
recollections of past times with the words, “when I was working as a
weaver boy at Norwich;” and there are other members of parliament, still
living, whose origin has been equally humble.  Mr. Lindsay, the
well-known ship owner, until recently member for Sunderland, once told
the simple story of his life to the electors of Weymouth, in answer to an
attack made upon him by his political opponents.  He had been left an
orphan at fourteen, and when he left Glasgow for Liverpool to push his
way in the world, not being able to pay the usual fare, the captain of
the steamer agreed to take his labour in exchange, and the boy worked his
passage by trimming the coals in the coal hole.  At Liverpool he remained
for seven weeks before he could obtain employment, during which time he
lived in sheds and fared hardly; until at last he found shelter on board
a West Indiaman.  He entered as a boy, and before he was nineteen, by
steady good conduct he had risen to the command of a ship.  At
twenty-three he retired from the sea, and settled on shore, after which
his progress was rapid “he had prospered,” he said, “by steady industry,
by constant work, and by ever keeping in view the great principle of
doing to others as you would be done by.”

The career of Mr. William Jackson, of Birkenhead, the present member for
North Derbyshire, bears considerable resemblance to that of Mr. Lindsay.
His father, a surgeon at Lancaster, died, leaving a family of eleven
children, of whom William Jackson was the seventh son.  The elder boys
had been well educated while the father lived, but at his death the
younger members had to shift for themselves.  William, when under twelve
years old, was taken from school, and put to hard work at a ship’s side
from six in the morning till nine at night.  His master falling ill, the
boy was taken into the counting-house, where he had more leisure.  This
gave him an opportunity of reading, and having obtained access to a set
of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ he read the volumes through from A to
Z, partly by day, but chiefly at night.  He afterwards put himself to a
trade, was diligent, and succeeded in it.  Now he has ships sailing on
almost every sea, and holds commercial relations with nearly every
country on the globe.

Among like men of the same class may be ranked the late Richard Cobden,
whose start in life was equally humble.  The son of a small farmer at
Midhurst in Sussex, he was sent at an early age to London and employed as
a boy in a warehouse in the City.  He was diligent, well conducted, and
eager for information.  His master, a man of the old school, warned him
against too much reading; but the boy went on in his own course, storing
his mind with the wealth found in books.  He was promoted from one
position of trust to another—became a traveller for his house—secured a
large connection, and eventually started in business as a calico printer
at Manchester.  Taking an interest in public questions, more especially
in popular education, his attention was gradually drawn to the subject of
the Corn Laws, to the repeal of which he may be said to have devoted his
fortune and his life.  It may be mentioned as a curious fact that the
first speech he delivered in public was a total failure.  But he had
great perseverance, application, and energy; and with persistency and
practice, he became at length one of the most persuasive and effective of
public speakers, extorting the disinterested eulogy of even Sir Robert
Peel himself.  M. Drouyn de Lhuys, the French Ambassador, has eloquently
said of Mr. Cobden, that he was “a living proof of what merit,
perseverance, and labour can accomplish; one of the most complete
examples of those men who, sprung from the humblest ranks of society,
raise themselves to the highest rank in public estimation by the effect
of their own worth and of their personal services; finally, one of the
rarest examples of the solid qualities inherent in the English
character.”

In all these cases, strenuous individual application was the price paid
for distinction; excellence of any sort being invariably placed beyond
the reach of indolence.  It is the diligent hand and head alone that
maketh rich—in self-culture, growth in wisdom, and in business.  Even
when men are born to wealth and high social position, any solid
reputation which they may individually achieve can only be attained by
energetic application; for though an inheritance of acres may be
bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot.  The wealthy
man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to
get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of
self-culture.  Indeed, the doctrine that excellence in any pursuit is
only to be achieved by laborious application, holds as true in the case
of the man of wealth as in that of Drew and Gifford, whose only school
was a cobbler’s stall, or Hugh Miller, whose only college was a Cromarty
stone quarry.

Riches and ease, it is perfectly clear, are not necessary for man’s
highest culture, else had not the world been so largely indebted in all
times to those who have sprung from the humbler ranks.  An easy and
luxurious existence does not train men to effort or encounter with
difficulty; nor does it awaken that consciousness of power which is so
necessary for energetic and effective action in life.  Indeed, so far
from poverty being a misfortune, it may, by vigorous self-help, be
converted even into a blessing; rousing a man to that struggle with the
world in which, though some may purchase ease by degradation, the
right-minded and true-hearted find strength, confidence, and triumph.
Bacon says, “Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their
strength: of the former they believe greater things than they should; of
the latter much less.  Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to
drink out of his own cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn
and labour truly to get his living, and carefully to expend the good
things committed to his trust.”

Riches are so great a temptation to ease and self-indulgence, to which
men are by nature prone, that the glory is all the greater of those who,
born to ample fortunes, nevertheless take an active part in the work of
their generation—who “scorn delights and live laborious days.”  It is to
the honour of the wealthier ranks in this country that they are not
idlers; for they do their fair share of the work of the state, and
usually take more than their fair share of its dangers.  It was a fine
thing said of a subaltern officer in the Peninsular campaigns, observed
trudging alone through mud and mire by the side of his regiment, “There
goes 15,000_l._ a year!” and in our own day, the bleak slopes of
Sebastopol and the burning soil of India have borne witness to the like
noble self-denial and devotion on the part of our gentler classes; many a
gallant and noble fellow, of rank and estate, having risked his life, or
lost it, in one or other of those fields of action, in the service of his
country.

Nor have the wealthier classes been undistinguished in the more peaceful
pursuits of philosophy and science.  Take, for instance, the great names
of Bacon, the father of modern philosophy, and of Worcester, Boyle,
Cavendish, Talbot, and Rosse, in science.  The last named may be regarded
as the great mechanic of the peerage; a man who, if he had not been born
a peer, would probably have taken the highest rank as an inventor.  So
thorough is his knowledge of smith-work that he is said to have been
pressed on one occasion to accept the foremanship of a large workshop, by
a manufacturer to whom his rank was unknown.  The great Rosse telescope,
of his own fabrication, is certainly the most extraordinary instrument of
the kind that has yet been constructed.

But it is principally in the departments of politics and literature that
we find the most energetic labourers amongst our higher classes.  Success
in these lines of action, as in all others, can only be achieved through
industry, practice, and study; and the great Minister, or parliamentary
leader, must necessarily be amongst the very hardest of workers.  Such
was Palmerston; and such are Derby and Russell, Disraeli and Gladstone.
These men have had the benefit of no Ten Hours Bill, but have often,
during the busy season of Parliament, worked “double shift,” almost day
and night.  One of the most illustrious of such workers in modern times
was unquestionably the late Sir Robert Peel.  He possessed in an
extraordinary degree the power of continuous intellectual labour, nor did
he spare himself.  His career, indeed, presented a remarkable example of
how much a man of comparatively moderate powers can accomplish by means
of assiduous application and indefatigable industry.  During the forty
years that he held a seat in Parliament, his labours were prodigious.  He
was a most conscientious man, and whatever he undertook to do, he did
thoroughly.  All his speeches bear evidence of his careful study of
everything that had been spoken or written on the subject under
consideration.  He was elaborate almost to excess; and spared no pains to
adapt himself to the various capacities of his audience.  Withal, he
possessed much practical sagacity, great strength of purpose, and power
to direct the issues of action with steady hand and eye.  In one respect
he surpassed most men: his principles broadened and enlarged with time;
and age, instead of contracting, only served to mellow and ripen his
nature.  To the last he continued open to the reception of new views,
and, though many thought him cautious to excess, he did not allow himself
to fall into that indiscriminating admiration of the past, which is the
palsy of many minds similarly educated, and renders the old age of many
nothing but a pity.

The indefatigable industry of Lord Brougham has become almost proverbial.
His public labours have extended over a period of upwards of sixty years,
during which he has ranged over many fields—of law, literature, politics,
and science,—and achieved distinction in them all.  How he contrived it,
has been to many a mystery.  Once, when Sir Samuel Romilly was requested
to undertake some new work, he excused himself by saying that he had no
time; “but,” he added, “go with it to that fellow Brougham, he seems to
have time for everything.”  The secret of it was, that he never left a
minute unemployed; withal he possessed a constitution of iron.  When
arrived at an age at which most men would have retired from the world to
enjoy their hard-earned leisure, perhaps to doze away their time in an
easy chair, Lord Brougham commenced and prosecuted a series of elaborate
investigations as to the laws of Light, and he submitted the results to
the most scientific audiences that Paris and London could muster.  About
the same time, he was passing through the press his admirable sketches of
the ‘Men of Science and Literature of the Reign of George III.,’ and
taking his full share of the law business and the political discussions
in the House of Lords.  Sydney Smith once recommended him to confine
himself to only the transaction of so much business as three strong men
could get through.  But such was Brougham’s love of work—long become a
habit—that no amount of application seems to have been too great for him;
and such was his love of excellence, that it has been said of him that if
his station in life had been only that of a shoe-black, he would never
have rested satisfied until he had become the best shoe-black in England.

Another hard-working man of the same class is Sir E. Bulwer Lytton.  Few
writers have done more, or achieved higher distinction in various
walks—as a novelist, poet, dramatist, historian, essayist, orator, and
politician.  He has worked his way step by step, disdainful of ease, and
animated throughout by the ardent desire to excel.  On the score of mere
industry, there are few living English writers who have written so much,
and none that have produced so much of high quality.  The industry of
Bulwer is entitled to all the greater praise that it has been entirely
self-imposed.  To hunt, and shoot, and live at ease,—to frequent the
clubs and enjoy the opera, with the variety of London visiting and
sight-seeing during the “season,” and then off to the country mansion,
with its well-stocked preserves, and its thousand delightful out-door
pleasures,—to travel abroad, to Paris, Vienna, or Rome,—all this is
excessively attractive to a lover of pleasure and a man of fortune, and
by no means calculated to make him voluntarily undertake continuous
labour of any kind.  Yet these pleasures, all within his reach, Bulwer
must, as compared with men born to similar estate, have denied himself in
assuming the position and pursuing the career of a literary man.  Like
Byron, his first effort was poetical (‘Weeds and Wild Flowers’), and a
failure.  His second was a novel (‘Falkland’), and it proved a failure
too.  A man of weaker nerve would have dropped authorship; but Bulwer had
pluck and perseverance; and he worked on, determined to succeed.  He was
incessantly industrious, read extensively, and from failure went
courageously onwards to success.  ‘Pelham’ followed ‘Falkland’ within a
year, and the remainder of Bulwer’s literary life, now extending over a
period of thirty years, has been a succession of triumphs.

Mr. Disraeli affords a similar instance of the power of industry and
application in working out an eminent public career.  His first
achievements were, like Bulwer’s, in literature; and he reached success
only through a succession of failures.  His ‘Wondrous Tale of Alroy’ and
‘Revolutionary Epic’ were laughed at, and regarded as indications of
literary lunacy.  But he worked on in other directions, and his
‘Coningsby,’ ‘Sybil,’ and ‘Tancred,’ proved the sterling stuff of which
he was made.  As an orator too, his first appearance in the House of
Commons was a failure.  It was spoken of as “more screaming than an
Adelphi farce.”  Though composed in a grand and ambitious strain, every
sentence was hailed with “loud laughter.”  ‘Hamlet’ played as a comedy
were nothing to it.  But he concluded with a sentence which embodied a
prophecy.  Writhing under the laughter with which his studied eloquence
had been received, he exclaimed, “I have begun several times many things,
and have succeeded in them at last.  I shall sit down now, but the time
will come when you will hear me.”  The time did come; and how Disraeli
succeeded in at length commanding the attention of the first assembly of
gentlemen in the world, affords a striking illustration of what energy
and determination will do; for Disraeli earned his position by dint of
patient industry.  He did not, as many young men do, having once failed,
retire dejected, to mope and whine in a corner, but diligently set
himself to work.  He carefully unlearnt his faults, studied the character
of his audience, practised sedulously the art of speech, and
industriously filled his mind with the elements of parliamentary
knowledge.  He worked patiently for success; and it came, but slowly:
then the House laughed with him, instead of at him.  The recollection of
his early failure was effaced, and by general consent he was at length
admitted to be one of the most finished and effective of parliamentary
speakers.

Although much may be accomplished by means of individual industry and
energy, as these and other instances set forth in the following pages
serve to illustrate, it must at the same time be acknowledged that the
help which we derive from others in the journey of life is of very great
importance.  The poet Wordsworth has well said that “these two things,
contradictory though they may seem, must go together—manly dependence and
manly independence, manly reliance and manly self-reliance.”  From
infancy to old age, all are more or less indebted to others for nurture
and culture; and the best and strongest are usually found the readiest to
acknowledge such help.  Take, for example, the career of the late Alexis
de Tocqueville, a man doubly well-born, for his father was a
distinguished peer of France, and his mother a grand-daughter of
Malesherbes.  Through powerful family influence, he was appointed Judge
Auditor at Versailles when only twenty-one; but probably feeling that he
had not fairly won the position by merit, he determined to give it up and
owe his future advancement in life to himself alone.  “A foolish
resolution,” some will say; but De Tocqueville bravely acted it out.  He
resigned his appointment, and made arrangements to leave France for the
purpose of travelling through the United States, the results of which
were published in his great book on ‘Democracy in America.’  His friend
and travelling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, has described his
indefatigable industry during this journey.  “His nature,” he says, “was
wholly averse to idleness, and whether he was travelling or resting, his
mind was always at work. . . . With Alexis, the most agreeable
conversation was that which was the most useful.  The worst day was the
lost day, or the day ill spent; the least loss of time annoyed him.”
Tocqueville himself wrote to a friend—“There is no time of life at which
one can wholly cease from action, for effort without one’s self, and
still more effort within, is equally necessary, if not more so, when we
grow old, as it is in youth.  I compare man in this world to a traveller
journeying without ceasing towards a colder and colder region; the higher
he goes, the faster he ought to walk.  The great malady of the soul is
cold.  And in resisting this formidable evil, one needs not only to be
sustained by the action of a mind employed, but also by contact with
one’s fellows in the business of life.” {25}

Notwithstanding de Tocqueville’s decided views as to the necessity of
exercising individual energy and self-dependence, no one could be more
ready than he was to recognise the value of that help and support for
which all men are indebted to others in a greater or less degree.  Thus,
he often acknowledged, with gratitude, his obligations to his friends De
Kergorlay and Stofells,—to the former for intellectual assistance, and to
the latter for moral support and sympathy.  To De Kergorlay he
wrote—“Thine is the only soul in which I have confidence, and whose
influence exercises a genuine effect upon my own.  Many others have
influence upon the details of my actions, but no one has so much
influence as thou on the origination of fundamental ideas, and of those
principles which are the rule of conduct.”  De Tocqueville was not less
ready to confess the great obligations which he owed to his wife, Marie,
for the preservation of that temper and frame of mind which enabled him
to prosecute his studies with success.  He believed that a noble-minded
woman insensibly elevated the character of her husband, while one of a
grovelling nature as certainly tended to degrade it. {26}

In fine, human character is moulded by a thousand subtle influences; by
example and precept; by life and literature; by friends and neighbours;
by the world we live in as well as by the spirits of our forefathers,
whose legacy of good words and deeds we inherit.  But great,
unquestionably, though these influences are acknowledged to be, it is
nevertheless equally clear that men must necessarily be the active agents
of their own well-being and well-doing; and that, however much the wise
and the good may owe to others, they themselves must in the very nature
of things be their own best helpers.




CHAPTER II.
LEADERS OF INDUSTRY—INVENTORS AND PRODUCERS.


    “Le travail et la Science sont désormais les maîtres du monde.”—_De
    Salvandy_.

    “Deduct all that men of the humbler classes have done for England in
    the way of inventions only, and see where she would have been but for
    them.”—_Arthur Helps_.

ONE of the most strongly-marked features of the English people is their
spirit of industry, standing out prominent and distinct in their past
history, and as strikingly characteristic of them now as at any former
period.  It is this spirit, displayed by the commons of England, which
has laid the foundations and built up the industrial greatness of the
empire.  This vigorous growth of the nation has been mainly the result of
the free energy of individuals, and it has been contingent upon the
number of hands and minds from time to time actively employed within it,
whether as cultivators of the soil, producers of articles of utility,
contrivers of tools and machines, writers of books, or creators of works
of art.  And while this spirit of active industry has been the vital
principle of the nation, it has also been its saving and remedial one,
counteracting from time to time the effects of errors in our laws and
imperfections in our constitution.

The career of industry which the nation has pursued, has also proved its
best education.  As steady application to work is the healthiest training
for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state.
Honourable industry travels the same road with duty; and Providence has
closely linked both with happiness.  The gods, says the poet, have placed
labour and toil on the way leading to the Elysian fields.  Certain it is
that no bread eaten by man is so sweet as that earned by his own labour,
whether bodily or mental.  By labour the earth has been subdued, and man
redeemed from barbarism; nor has a single step in civilization been made
without it.  Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a blessing:
only the idler feels it to be a curse.  The duty of work is written on
the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of the hand, the nerves
and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose healthy action is satisfaction
and enjoyment.  In the school of labour is taught the best practical
wisdom; nor is a life of manual employment, as we shall hereafter find,
incompatible with high mental culture.

Hugh Miller, than whom none knew better the strength and the weakness
belonging to the lot of labour, stated the result of his experience to
be, that Work, even the hardest, is full of pleasure and materials for
self-improvement.  He held honest labour to be the best of teachers, and
that the school of toil is the noblest of schools—save only the Christian
one,—that it is a school in which the ability of being useful is
imparted, the spirit of independence learnt, and the habit of persevering
effort acquired.  He was even of opinion that the training of the
mechanic,—by the exercise which it gives to his observant faculties, from
his daily dealing with things actual and practical, and the close
experience of life which he acquires,—better fits him for picking his way
along the journey of life, and is more favourable to his growth as a Man,
emphatically speaking, than the training afforded by any other condition.

The array of great names which we have already cursorily cited, of men
springing from the ranks of the industrial classes, who have achieved
distinction in various walks of life—in science, commerce, literature,
and art—shows that at all events the difficulties interposed by poverty
and labour are not insurmountable.  As respects the great contrivances
and inventions which have conferred so much power and wealth upon the
nation, it is unquestionable that for the greater part of them we have
been indebted to men of the humblest rank.  Deduct what they have done in
this particular line of action, and it will be found that very little
indeed remains for other men to have accomplished.

Inventors have set in motion some of the greatest industries of the
world.  To them society owes many of its chief necessaries, comforts, and
luxuries; and by their genius and labour daily life has been rendered in
all respects more easy as well as enjoyable.  Our food, our clothing, the
furniture of our homes, the glass which admits the light to our dwellings
at the same time that it excludes the cold, the gas which illuminates our
streets, our means of locomotion by land and by sea, the tools by which
our various articles of necessity and luxury are fabricated, have been
the result of the labour and ingenuity of many men and many minds.
Mankind at large are all the happier for such inventions, and are every
day reaping the benefit of them in an increase of individual well-being
as well as of public enjoyment.

Though the invention of the working steam-engine—the king of
machines—belongs, comparatively speaking, to our own epoch, the idea of
it was born many centuries ago.  Like other contrivances and discoveries,
it was effected step by step—one man transmitting the result of his
labours, at the time apparently useless, to his successors, who took it
up and carried it forward another stage,—the prosecution of the inquiry
extending over many generations.  Thus the idea promulgated by Hero of
Alexandria was never altogether lost; but, like the grain of wheat hid in
the hand of the Egyptian mummy, it sprouted and again grew vigorously
when brought into the full light of modern science.  The steam-engine was
nothing, however, until it emerged from the state of theory, and was
taken in hand by practical mechanics; and what a noble story of patient,
laborious investigation, of difficulties encountered and overcome by
heroic industry, does not that marvellous machine tell of!  It is indeed,
in itself, a monument of the power of self-help in man.  Grouped around
it we find Savary, the military engineer; Newcomen, the Dartmouth
blacksmith; Cawley, the glazier; Potter, the engine-boy; Smeaton, the
civil engineer; and, towering above all, the laborious, patient,
never-tiring James Watt, the mathematical-instrument maker.

Watt was one of the most industrious of men; and the story of his life
proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man of the
greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the highest results,
but he who employs his powers with the greatest industry and the most
carefully disciplined skill—the skill that comes by labour, application,
and experience.  Many men in his time knew far more than Watt, but none
laboured so assiduously as he did to turn all that he did know to useful
practical purposes.  He was, above all things, most persevering in the
pursuit of facts.  He cultivated carefully that habit of active attention
on which all the higher working qualities of the mind mainly depend.
Indeed, Mr. Edgeworth entertained the opinion, that the difference of
intellect in men depends more upon the early cultivation of this _habit
of attention_, than upon any great disparity between the powers of one
individual and another.

Even when a boy, Watt found science in his toys.  The quadrants lying
about his father’s carpenter’s shop led him to the study of optics and
astronomy; his ill health induced him to pry into the secrets of
physiology; and his solitary walks through the country attracted him to
the study of botany and history.  While carrying on the business of a
mathematical-instrument maker, he received an order to build an organ;
and, though without an ear for music, he undertook the study of
harmonics, and successfully constructed the instrument.  And, in like
manner, when the little model of Newcomen’s steam-engine, belonging to
the University of Glasgow, was placed in his hands to repair, he
forthwith set himself to learn all that was then known about heat,
evaporation, and condensation,—at the same time plodding his way in
mechanics and the science of construction,—the results of which he at
length embodied in his condensing steam-engine.

For ten years he went on contriving and inventing—with little hope to
cheer him, and with few friends to encourage him.  He went on, meanwhile,
earning bread for his family by making and selling quadrants, making and
mending fiddles, flutes, and musical instruments; measuring mason-work,
surveying roads, superintending the construction of canals, or doing
anything that turned up, and offered a prospect of honest gain.  At
length, Watt found a fit partner in another eminent leader of
industry—Matthew Boulton, of Birmingham; a skilful, energetic, and
far-seeing man, who vigorously undertook the enterprise of introducing
the condensing-engine into general use as a working power; and the
success of both is now matter of history. {31}

Many skilful inventors have from time to time added new power to the
steam-engine; and, by numerous modifications, rendered it capable of
being applied to nearly all the purposes of manufacture—driving
machinery, impelling ships, grinding corn, printing books, stamping
money, hammering, planing, and turning iron; in short, of performing
every description of mechanical labour where power is required.  One of
the most useful modifications in the engine was that devised by
Trevithick, and eventually perfected by George Stephenson and his son, in
the form of the railway locomotive, by which social changes of immense
importance have been brought about, of even greater consequence,
considered in their results on human progress and civilization, than the
condensing-engine of Watt.

One of the first grand results of Watt’s invention,—which placed an
almost unlimited power at the command of the producing classes,—was the
establishment of the cotton-manufacture.  The person most closely
identified with the foundation of this great branch of industry was
unquestionably Sir Richard Arkwright, whose practical energy and sagacity
were perhaps even more remarkable than his mechanical inventiveness.  His
originality as an inventor has indeed been called in question, like that
of Watt and Stephenson.  Arkwright probably stood in the same relation to
the spinning-machine that Watt did to the steam-engine and Stephenson to
the locomotive.  He gathered together the scattered threads of ingenuity
which already existed, and wove them, after his own design, into a new
and original fabric.  Though Lewis Paul, of Birmingham, patented the
invention of spinning by rollers thirty years before Arkwright, the
machines constructed by him were so imperfect in their details, that they
could not be profitably worked, and the invention was practically a
failure.  Another obscure mechanic, a reed-maker of Leigh, named Thomas
Highs, is also said to have invented the water-frame and spinning-jenny;
but they, too, proved unsuccessful.

When the demands of industry are found to press upon the resources of
inventors, the same idea is usually found floating about in many
minds;—such has been the case with the steam-engine, the safety-lamp, the
electric telegraph, and other inventions.  Many ingenious minds are found
labouring in the throes of invention, until at length the master mind,
the strong practical man, steps forward, and straightway delivers them of
their idea, applies the principle successfully, and the thing is done.
Then there is a loud outcry among all the smaller contrivers, who see
themselves distanced in the race; and hence men such as Watt, Stephenson,
and Arkwright, have usually to defend their reputation and their rights
as practical and successful inventors.

Richard Arkwright, like most of our great mechanicians, sprang from the
ranks.  He was born in Preston in 1732.  His parents were very poor, and
he was the youngest of thirteen children.  He was never at school: the
only education he received he gave to himself; and to the last he was
only able to write with difficulty.  When a boy, he was apprenticed to a
barber, and after learning the business, he set up for himself in Bolton,
where he occupied an underground cellar, over which he put up the sign,
“Come to the subterraneous barber—he shaves for a penny.”  The other
barbers found their customers leaving them, and reduced their prices to
his standard, when Arkwright, determined to push his trade, announced his
determination to give “A clean shave for a halfpenny.”  After a few years
he quitted his cellar, and became an itinerant dealer in hair.  At that
time wigs were worn, and wig-making formed an important branch of the
barbering business.  Arkwright went about buying hair for the wigs.  He
was accustomed to attend the hiring fairs throughout Lancashire resorted
to by young women, for the purpose of securing their long tresses; and it
is said that in negotiations of this sort he was very successful.  He
also dealt in a chemical hair dye, which he used adroitly, and thereby
secured a considerable trade.  But he does not seem, notwithstanding his
pushing character, to have done more than earn a bare living.

The fashion of wig-wearing having undergone a change, distress fell upon
the wig-makers; and Arkwright, being of a mechanical turn, was
consequently induced to turn machine inventor or “conjurer,” as the
pursuit was then popularly termed.  Many attempts were made about that
time to invent a spinning-machine, and our barber determined to launch
his little bark on the sea of invention with the rest.  Like other
self-taught men of the same bias, he had already been devoting his spare
time to the invention of a perpetual-motion machine; and from that the
transition to a spinning-machine was easy.  He followed his experiments
so assiduously that he neglected his business, lost the little money he
had saved, and was reduced to great poverty.  His wife—for he had by this
time married—was impatient at what she conceived to be a wanton waste of
time and money, and in a moment of sudden wrath she seized upon and
destroyed his models, hoping thus to remove the cause of the family
privations.  Arkwright was a stubborn and enthusiastic man, and he was
provoked beyond measure by this conduct of his wife, from whom he
immediately separated.

In travelling about the country, Arkwright had become acquainted with a
person named Kay, a clockmaker at Warrington, who assisted him in
constructing some of the parts of his perpetual-motion machinery.  It is
supposed that he was informed by Kay of the principle of spinning by
rollers; but it is also said that the idea was first suggested to him by
accidentally observing a red-hot piece of iron become elongated by
passing between iron rollers.  However this may be, the idea at once took
firm possession of his mind, and he proceeded to devise the process by
which it was to be accomplished, Kay being able to tell him nothing on
this point.  Arkwright now abandoned his business of hair collecting, and
devoted himself to the perfecting of his machine, a model of which,
constructed by Kay under his directions, he set up in the parlour of the
Free Grammar School at Preston.  Being a burgess of the town, he voted at
the contested election at which General Burgoyne was returned; but such
was his poverty, and such the tattered state of his dress, that a number
of persons subscribed a sum sufficient to have him put in a state fit to
appear in the poll-room.  The exhibition of his machine in a town where
so many workpeople lived by the exercise of manual labour proved a
dangerous experiment; ominous growlings were heard outside the
school-room from time to time, and Arkwright,—remembering the fate of
Kay, who was mobbed and compelled to fly from Lancashire because of his
invention of the fly-shuttle, and of poor Hargreaves, whose
spinning-jenny had been pulled to pieces only a short time before by a
Blackburn mob,—wisely determined on packing up his model and removing to
a less dangerous locality.  He went accordingly to Nottingham, where he
applied to some of the local bankers for pecuniary assistance; and the
Messrs. Wright consented to advance him a sum of money on condition of
sharing in the profits of the invention.  The machine, however, not being
perfected so soon as they had anticipated, the bankers recommended
Arkwright to apply to Messrs. Strutt and Need, the former of whom was the
ingenious inventor and patentee of the stocking-frame.  Mr. Strutt at
once appreciated the merits of the invention, and a partnership was
entered into with Arkwright, whose road to fortune was now clear.  The
patent was secured in the name of “Richard Arkwright, of Nottingham,
clockmaker,” and it is a circumstance worthy of note, that it was taken
out in 1769, the same year in which Watt secured the patent for his
steam-engine.  A cotton-mill was first erected at Nottingham, driven by
horses; and another was shortly after built, on a much larger scale, at
Cromford, in Derbyshire, turned by a water-wheel, from which circumstance
the spinning-machine came to be called the water-frame.

Arkwright’s labours, however, were, comparatively speaking, only begun.
He had still to perfect all the working details of his machine.  It was
in his hands the subject of constant modification and improvement, until
eventually it was rendered practicable and profitable in an eminent
degree.  But success was only secured by long and patient labour: for
some years, indeed, the speculation was disheartening and unprofitable,
swallowing up a very large amount of capital without any result.  When
success began to appear more certain, then the Lancashire manufacturers
fell upon Arkwright’s patent to pull it in pieces, as the Cornish miners
fell upon Boulton and Watt to rob them of the profits of their
steam-engine.  Arkwright was even denounced as the enemy of the working
people; and a mill which he built near Chorley was destroyed by a mob in
the presence of a strong force of police and military.  The Lancashire
men refused to buy his materials, though they were confessedly the best
in the market.  Then they refused to pay patent-right for the use of his
machines, and combined to crush him in the courts of law.  To the disgust
of right-minded people, Arkwright’s patent was upset.  After the trial,
when passing the hotel at which his opponents were staying, one of them
said, loud enough to be heard by him, “Well, we’ve done the old shaver at
last;” to which he coolly replied, “Never mind, I’ve a razor left that
will shave you all.”  He established new mills in Lancashire, Derbyshire,
and at New Lanark, in Scotland.  The mills at Cromford also came into his
hands at the expiry of his partnership with Strutt, and the amount and
the excellence of his products were such, that in a short time he
obtained so complete a control of the trade, that the prices were fixed
by him, and he governed the main operations of the other cotton-spinners.

Arkwright was a man of great force of character, indomitable courage,
much worldly shrewdness, with a business faculty almost amounting to
genius.  At one period his time was engrossed by severe and continuous
labour, occasioned by the organising and conducting of his numerous
manufactories, sometimes from four in the morning till nine at night.  At
fifty years of age he set to work to learn English grammar, and improve
himself in writing and orthography.  After overcoming every obstacle, he
had the satisfaction of reaping the reward of his enterprise.  Eighteen
years after he had constructed his first machine, he rose to such
estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the
county, and shortly after George III. conferred upon him the honour of
knighthood.  He died in 1792.  Be it for good or for evil, Arkwright was
the founder in England of the modern factory system, a branch of industry
which has unquestionably proved a source of immense wealth to individuals
and to the nation.

All the other great branches of industry in Britain furnish like examples
of energetic men of business, the source of much benefit to the
neighbourhoods in which they have laboured, and of increased power and
wealth to the community at large.  Amongst such might be cited the
Strutts of Belper; the Tennants of Glasgow; the Marshalls and Gotts of
Leeds; the Peels, Ashworths, Birleys, Fieldens, Ashtons, Heywoods, and
Ainsworths of South Lancashire, some of whose descendants have since
become distinguished in connection with the political history of England.
Such pre-eminently were the Peels of South Lancashire.

The founder of the Peel family, about the middle of last century, was a
small yeoman, occupying the Hole House Farm, near Blackburn, from which
he afterwards removed to a house situated in Fish Lane in that town.
Robert Peel, as he advanced in life, saw a large family of sons and
daughters growing up about him; but the land about Blackburn being
somewhat barren, it did not appear to him that agricultural pursuits
offered a very encouraging prospect for their industry.  The place had,
however, long been the seat of a domestic manufacture—the fabric called
“Blackburn greys,” consisting of linen weft and cotton warp, being
chiefly made in that town and its neighbourhood.  It was then
customary—previous to the introduction of the factory system—for
industrious yeomen with families to employ the time not occupied in the
fields in weaving at home; and Robert Peel accordingly began the domestic
trade of calico-making.  He was honest, and made an honest article;
thrifty and hardworking, and his trade prospered.  He was also
enterprising, and was one of the first to adopt the carding cylinder,
then recently invented.

But Robert Peel’s attention was principally directed to the _printing_ of
calico—then a comparatively unknown art—and for some time he carried on a
series of experiments with the object of printing by machinery.  The
experiments were secretly conducted in his own house, the cloth being
ironed for the purpose by one of the women of the family.  It was then
customary, in such houses as the Peels, to use pewter plates at dinner.
Having sketched a figure or pattern on one of the plates, the thought
struck him that an impression might be got from it in reverse, and
printed on calico with colour.  In a cottage at the end of the farm-house
lived a woman who kept a calendering machine, and going into her cottage,
he put the plate with colour rubbed into the figured part and some calico
over it, through the machine, when it was found to leave a satisfactory
impression.  Such is said to have been the origin of roller printing on
calico.  Robert Peel shortly perfected his process, and the first pattern
he brought out was a parsley leaf; hence he is spoken of in the
neighbourhood of Blackburn to this day as “Parsley Peel.”  The process of
calico printing by what is called the mule machine—that is, by means of a
wooden cylinder in relief, with an engraved copper cylinder—was
afterwards brought to perfection by one of his sons, the head of the firm
of Messrs. Peel and Co., of Church.  Stimulated by his success, Robert
Peel shortly gave up farming, and removing to Brookside, a village about
two miles from Blackburn, he devoted himself exclusively to the printing
business.  There, with the aid of his sons, who were as energetic as
himself, he successfully carried on the trade for several years; and as
the young men grew up towards manhood, the concern branched out into
various firms of Peels, each of which became a centre of industrial
activity and a source of remunerative employment to large numbers of
people.

From what can now be learnt of the character of the original and untitled
Robert Peel, he must have been a remarkable man—shrewd, sagacious, and
far-seeing.  But little is known of him excepting from traditions and the
sons of those who knew him are fast passing away.  His son, Sir Robert,
thus modestly spoke of him:—“My father may be truly said to have been the
founder of our family; and he so accurately appreciated the importance of
commercial wealth in a national point of view, that he was often heard to
say that the gains to individuals were small compared with the national
gains arising from trade.”

Sir Robert Peel, the first baronet and the second manufacturer of the
name, inherited all his father’s enterprise, ability, and industry.  His
position, at starting in life, was little above that of an ordinary
working man; for his father, though laying the foundations of future
prosperity, was still struggling with the difficulties arising from
insufficient capital.  When Robert was only twenty years of age, he
determined to begin the business of cotton-printing, which he had by this
time learnt from his father, on his own account.  His uncle, James
Haworth, and William Yates of Blackburn, joined him in his enterprise;
the whole capital which they could raise amongst them amounting to only
about 500_l._, the principal part of which was supplied by William Yates.
The father of the latter was a householder in Blackburn, where he was
well known and much respected; and having saved money by his business, he
was willing to advance sufficient to give his son a start in the
lucrative trade of cotton-printing, then in its infancy.  Robert Peel,
though comparatively a mere youth, supplied the practical knowledge of
the business; but it was said of him, and proved true, that he “carried
an old head on young shoulders.”  A ruined corn-mill, with its adjoining
fields, was purchased for a comparatively small sum, near the then
insignificant town of Bury, where the works long after continued to be
known as “The Ground;” and a few wooden sheds having been run up, the
firm commenced their cotton-printing business in a very humble way in the
year 1770, adding to it that of cotton-spinning a few years later.  The
frugal style in which the partners lived may be inferred from the
following incident in their early career.  William Yates, being a married
man with a family, commenced housekeeping on a small scale, and, to
oblige Peel, who was single, he agreed to take him as a lodger.  The sum
which the latter first paid for board and lodging was only 8_s._ a week;
but Yates, considering this too little, insisted on the weekly payment
being increased a shilling, to which Peel at first demurred, and a
difference between the partners took place, which was eventually
compromised by the lodger paying an advance of sixpence a week.  William
Yates’s eldest child was a girl named Ellen, and she very soon became an
especial favourite with the young lodger.  On returning from his hard
day’s work at “The Ground,” he would take the little girl upon his knee,
and say to her, “Nelly, thou bonny little dear, wilt be my wife?” to
which the child would readily answer “Yes,” as any child would do.  “Then
I’ll wait for thee, Nelly; I’ll wed thee, and none else.”  And Robert
Peel did wait.  As the girl grew in beauty towards womanhood, his
determination to wait for her was strengthened; and after the lapse of
ten years—years of close application to business and rapidly increasing
prosperity—Robert Peel married Ellen Yates when she had completed her
seventeenth year; and the pretty child, whom her mother’s lodger and
father’s partner had nursed upon his knee, became Mrs. Peel, and
eventually Lady Peel, the mother of the future Prime Minister of England.
Lady Peel was a noble and beautiful woman, fitted to grace any station in
life.  She possessed rare powers of mind, and was, on every emergency,
the high-souled and faithful counsellor of her husband.  For many years
after their marriage, she acted as his amanuensis, conducting the
principal part of his business correspondence, for Mr. Peel himself was
an indifferent and almost unintelligible writer.  She died in 1803, only
three years after the Baronetcy had been conferred upon her husband.  It
is said that London fashionable life—so unlike what she had been
accustomed to at home—proved injurious to her health; and old Mr. Yates
afterwards used to say, “if Robert hadn’t made our Nelly a ‘Lady,’ she
might ha’ been living yet.”

The career of Yates, Peel, & Co., was throughout one of great and
uninterrupted prosperity.  Sir Robert Peel himself was the soul of the
firm; to great energy and application uniting much practical sagacity,
and first-rate mercantile abilities—qualities in which many of the early
cotton-spinners were exceedingly deficient.  He was a man of iron mind
and frame, and toiled unceasingly.  In short, he was to cotton printing
what Arkwright was to cotton-spinning, and his success was equally great.
The excellence of the articles produced by the firm secured the command
of the market, and the character of the firm stood pre-eminent in
Lancashire.  Besides greatly benefiting Bury, the partnership planted
similar extensive works in the neighbourhood, on the Irwell and the Roch;
and it was cited to their honour, that, while they sought to raise to the
highest perfection the quality of their manufactures, they also
endeavoured, in all ways, to promote the well-being and comfort of their
workpeople; for whom they contrived to provide remunerative employment
even in the least prosperous times.

Sir Robert Peel readily appreciated the value of all new processes and
inventions; in illustration of which we may allude to his adoption of the
process for producing what is called _resist work_ in calico printing.
This is accomplished by the use of a paste, or resist, on such parts of
the cloth as were intended to remain white.  The person who discovered
the paste was a traveller for a London house, who sold it to Mr. Peel for
an inconsiderable sum.  It required the experience of a year or two to
perfect the system and make it practically useful; but the beauty of its
effect, and the extreme precision of outline in the pattern produced, at
once placed the Bury establishment at the head of all the factories for
calico printing in the country.  Other firms, conducted with like spirit,
were established by members of the same family at Burnley, Foxhill bank,
and Altham, in Lancashire; Salley Abbey, in Yorkshire; and afterwards at
Burton-on-Trent, in Staffordshire; these various establishments, whilst
they brought wealth to their proprietors, setting an example to the whole
cotton trade, and training up many of the most successful printers and
manufacturers in Lancashire.

Among other distinguished founders of industry, the Rev. William Lee,
inventor of the Stocking Frame, and John Heathcoat, inventor of the
Bobbin-net Machine, are worthy of notice, as men of great mechanical
skill and perseverance, through whose labours a vast amount of
remunerative employment has been provided for the labouring population of
Nottingham and the adjacent districts.  The accounts which have been
preserved of the circumstances connected with the invention of the
Stocking Frame are very confused, and in many respects contradictory,
though there is no doubt as to the name of the inventor.  This was
William Lee, born at Woodborough, a village some seven miles from
Nottingham, about the year 1563.  According to some accounts, he was the
heir to a small freehold, while according to others he was a poor
scholar, {43a} and had to struggle with poverty from his earliest years.
He entered as a sizar at Christ College, Cambridge, in May, 1579, and
subsequently removed to St. John’s, taking his degree of B.A. in 1582–3.
It is believed that he commenced M.A. in 1586; but on this point there
appears to be some confusion in the records of the University.  The
statement usually made that he was expelled for marrying contrary to the
statutes, is incorrect, as he was never a Fellow of the University, and
therefore could not be prejudiced by taking such a step.

At the time when Lee invented the Stocking Frame he was officiating as
curate of Calverton, near Nottingham; and it is alleged by some writers
that the invention had its origin in disappointed affection.  The curate
is said to have fallen deeply in love with a young lady of the village,
who failed to reciprocate his affections; and when he visited her, she
was accustomed to pay much more attention to the process of knitting
stockings and instructing her pupils in the art, than to the addresses of
her admirer.  This slight is said to have created in his mind such an
aversion to knitting by hand, that he formed the determination to invent
a machine that should supersede it and render it a gainless employment.
For three years he devoted himself to the prosecution of the invention,
sacrificing everything to his new idea.  At the prospect of success
opened before him, he abandoned his curacy, and devoted himself to the
art of stocking making by machinery.  This is the version of the story
given by Henson {43b} on the authority of an old stocking-maker, who died
in Collins’s Hospital, Nottingham, aged ninety-two, and was apprenticed
in the town during the reign of Queen Anne.  It is also given by Deering
and Blackner as the traditional account in the neighbourhood, and it is
in some measure borne out by the arms of the London Company of Frame-Work
Knitters, which consists of a stocking frame without the wood-work, with
a clergyman on one side and a woman on the other as supporters. {44}

Whatever may have been the actual facts as to the origin of the invention
of the Stocking Loom, there can be no doubt as to the extraordinary
mechanical genius displayed by its inventor.  That a clergyman living in
a remote village, whose life had for the most part been spent with books,
should contrive a machine of such delicate and complicated movements, and
at once advance the art of knitting from the tedious process of linking
threads in a chain of loops by three skewers in the fingers of a woman,
to the beautiful and rapid process of weaving by the stocking frame, was
indeed an astonishing achievement, which may be pronounced almost
unequalled in the history of mechanical invention.  Lee’s merit was all
the greater, as the handicraft arts were then in their infancy, and
little attention had as yet been given to the contrivance of machinery
for the purposes of manufacture.  He was under the necessity of
extemporising the parts of his machine as he best could, and adopting
various expedients to overcome difficulties as they arose.  His tools
were imperfect, and his materials imperfect; and he had no skilled
workmen to assist him.  According to tradition, the first frame he made
was a twelve gauge, without lead sinkers, and it was almost wholly of
wood; the needles being also stuck in bits of wood.  One of Lee’s
principal difficulties consisted in the formation of the stitch, for want
of needle eyes; but this he eventually overcame by forming eyes to the
needles with a three-square file. {45}  At length, one difficulty after
another was successfully overcome, and after three years’ labour the
machine was sufficiently complete to be fit for use.  The quondam curate,
full of enthusiasm for his art, now began stocking weaving in the village
of Calverton, and he continued to work there for several years,
instructing his brother James and several of his relations in the
practice of the art.

Having brought his frame to a considerable degree of perfection, and
being desirous of securing the patronage of Queen Elizabeth, whose
partiality for knitted silk stockings was well known, Lee proceeded to
London to exhibit the loom before her Majesty.  He first showed it to
several members of the court, among others to Sir William (afterwards
Lord) Hunsdon, whom he taught to work it with success; and Lee was,
through their instrumentality, at length admitted to an interview with
the Queen, and worked the machine in her presence.  Elizabeth, however,
did not give him the encouragement that he had expected; and she is said
to have opposed the invention on the ground that it was calculated to
deprive a large number of poor people of their employment of hand
knitting.  Lee was no more successful in finding other patrons, and
considering himself and his invention treated with contempt, he embraced
the offer made to him by Sully, the sagacious minister of Henry IV., to
proceed to Rouen and instruct the operatives of that town—then one of the
most important manufacturing centres of France—in the construction and
use of the stocking-frame.  Lee accordingly transferred himself and his
machines to France, in 1605, taking with him his brother and seven
workmen.  He met with a cordial reception at Rouen, and was proceeding
with the manufacture of stockings on a large scale—having nine of his
frames in full work,—when unhappily ill fortune again overtook him.
Henry IV., his protector, on whom he had relied for the rewards, honours,
and promised grant of privileges, which had induced Lee to settle in
France, was murdered by the fanatic Ravaillac; and the encouragement and
protection which had heretofore been extended to him were at once
withdrawn.  To press his claims at court, Lee proceeded to Paris; but
being a protestant as well as a foreigner, his representations were
treated with neglect; and worn out with vexation and grief, this
distinguished inventor shortly after died at Paris, in a state of extreme
poverty and distress.

Lee’s brother, with seven of the workmen, succeeded in escaping from
France with their frames, leaving two behind.  On James Lee’s return to
Nottinghamshire, he was joined by one Ashton, a miller of Thoroton, who
had been instructed in the art of frame-work knitting by the inventor
himself before he left England.  These two, with the workmen and their
frames, began the stocking manufacture at Thoroton, and carried it on
with considerable success.  The place was favourably situated for the
purpose, as the sheep pastured in the neighbouring district of Sherwood
yielded a kind of wool of the longest staple.  Ashton is said to have
introduced the method of making the frames with lead sinkers, which was a
great improvement.  The number of looms employed in different parts of
England gradually increased; and the machine manufacture of stockings
eventually became an important branch of the national industry.

One of the most important modifications in the Stocking-Frame was that
which enabled it to be applied to the manufacture of lace on a large
scale.  In 1777, two workmen, Frost and Holmes, were both engaged in
making point-net by means of the modifications they had introduced in the
stocking-frame; and in the course of about thirty years, so rapid was the
growth of this branch of production that 1500 point-net frames were at
work, giving employment to upwards of 15,000 people.  Owing, however, to
the war, to change of fashion, and to other circumstances, the Nottingham
lace manufacture rapidly fell off; and it continued in a decaying state
until the invention of the Bobbin-net Machine by John Heathcoat, late
M.P. for Tiverton, which had the effect of at once re-establishing the
manufacture on solid foundations.

John Heathcoat was the youngest son of a respectable small farmer at
Duffield, Derbyshire, where he was born in 1783.  When at school he made
steady and rapid progress, but was early removed from it to be
apprenticed to a frame-smith near Loughborough.  The boy soon learnt to
handle tools with dexterity, and he acquired a minute knowledge of the
parts of which the stocking-frame was composed, as well as of the more
intricate warp-machine.  At his leisure he studied how to introduce
improvements in them, and his friend, Mr. Bazley, M.P., states that as
early as the age of sixteen, he conceived the idea of inventing a machine
by which lace might be made similar to Buckingham or French lace, then
all made by hand.  The first practical improvement he succeeded in
introducing was in the warp-frame, when, by means of an ingenious
apparatus, he succeeded in producing “mitts” of a lacy appearance, and it
was this success which determined him to pursue the study of mechanical
lace-making.  The stocking-frame had already, in a modified form, been
applied to the manufacture of point-net lace, in which the mesh was
_looped_ as in a stocking, but the work was slight and frail, and
therefore unsatisfactory.  Many ingenious Nottingham mechanics had,
during a long succession of years, been labouring at the problem of
inventing a machine by which the mesh of threads should be _twisted_
round each other on the formation of the net.  Some of these men died in
poverty, some were driven insane, and all alike failed in the object of
their search.  The old warp-machine held its ground.

When a little over twenty-one years of age, Heathcoat went to Nottingham,
where he readily found employment, for which he soon received the highest
remuneration, as a setter-up of hosiery and warp-frames, and was much
respected for his talent for invention, general intelligence, and the
sound and sober principles that governed his conduct.  He also continued
to pursue the subject on which his mind had before been occupied, and
laboured to compass the contrivance of a twist traverse-net machine.  He
first studied the art of making the Buckingham or pillow-lace by hand,
with the object of effecting the same motions by mechanical means.  It
was a long and laborious task, requiring the exercise of great
perseverance and ingenuity.  His master, Elliot, described him at that
time as inventive, patient, self-denying, and taciturn, undaunted by
failures and mistakes, full of resources and expedients, and entertaining
the most perfect confidence that his application of mechanical principles
would eventually be crowned with success.

It is difficult to describe in words an invention so complicated as the
bobbin-net machine.  It was, indeed, a mechanical pillow for making lace,
imitating in an ingenious manner the motions of the lace-maker’s fingers
in intersecting or tying the meshes of the lace upon her pillow.  On
analysing the component parts of a piece of hand-made lace, Heathcoat was
enabled to classify the threads into longitudinal and diagonal.  He began
his experiments by fixing common pack-threads lengthwise on a sort of
frame for the warp, and then passing the weft threads between them by
common plyers, delivering them to other plyers on the opposite side;
then, after giving them a sideways motion and twist, the threads were
repassed back between the next adjoining cords, the meshes being thus
tied in the same way as upon pillows by hand.  He had then to contrive a
mechanism that should accomplish all these nice and delicate movements,
and to do this cost him no small amount of mental toil.  Long after he
said, “The single difficulty of getting the diagonal threads to twist in
the allotted space was so great that if it had now to be done, I should
probably not attempt its accomplishment.”  His next step was to provide
thin metallic discs, to be used as bobbins for conducting the threads
backwards and forwards through the warp.  These discs, being arranged in
carrier-frames placed on each side of the warp, were moved by suitable
machinery so as to conduct the threads from side to side in forming the
lace.  He eventually succeeded in working out his principle with
extraordinary skill and success; and, at the age of twenty-four, he was
enabled to secure his invention by a patent.

During this time his wife was kept in almost as great anxiety as himself,
for she well knew of his trials and difficulties while he was striving to
perfect his invention.  Many years after they had been successfully
overcome, the conversation which took place one eventful evening was
vividly remembered.  “Well,” said the anxious wife, “will it work?”
“No,” was the sad answer; “I have had to take it all to pieces again.”
Though he could still speak hopefully and cheerfully, his poor wife could
restrain her feelings no longer, but sat down and cried bitterly.  She
had, however, only a few more weeks to wait, for success long laboured
for and richly deserved, came at last, and a proud and happy man was John
Heathcoat when he brought home the first narrow strip of bobbin-net made
by his machine, and placed it in the hands of his wife.

As in the case of nearly all inventions which have proved productive,
Heathcoat’s rights as a patentee were disputed, and his claims as an
inventor called in question.  On the supposed invalidity of the patent,
the lace-makers boldly adopted the bobbin-net machine, and set the
inventor at defiance.  But other patents were taken out for alleged
improvements and adaptations; and it was only when these new patentees
fell out and went to law with each other that Heathcoat’s rights became
established.  One lace-manufacturer having brought an action against
another for an alleged infringement of his patent, the jury brought in a
verdict for the defendant, in which the judge concurred, on the ground
that _both_ the machines in question were infringements of Heathcoat’s
patent.  It was on the occasion of this trial, “Boville v. Moore,” that
Sir John Copley (afterwards Lord Lyndhurst), who was retained for the
defence in the interest of Mr. Heathcoat, learnt to work the bobbin-net
machine in order that he might master the details of the invention.  On
reading over his brief, he confessed that he did not quite understand the
merits of the case; but as it seemed to him to be one of great
importance, he offered to go down into the country forthwith and study
the machine until he understood it; “and then,” said he, “I will defend
you to the best of my ability.”  He accordingly put himself into that
night’s mail, and went down to Nottingham to get up his case as perhaps
counsel never got it up before.  Next morning the learned sergeant placed
himself in a lace-loom, and he did not leave it until he could deftly
make a piece of bobbin-net with his own hands, and thoroughly understood
the principle as well as the details of the machine.  When the case came
on for trial, the learned sergeant was enabled to work the model on the
table with such case and skill, and to explain the precise nature of the
invention with such felicitous clearness, as to astonish alike judge,
jury, and spectators; and the thorough conscientiousness and mastery with
which he handled the case had no doubt its influence upon the decision of
the court.

After the trial was over, Mr. Heathcoat, on inquiry, found about six
hundred machines at work after his patent, and he proceeded to levy
royalty upon the owners of them, which amounted to a large sum.  But the
profits realised by the manufacturers of lace were very great, and the
use of the machines rapidly extended; while the price of the article was
reduced from five pounds the square yard to about five pence in the
course of twenty-five years.  During the same period the average annual
returns of the lace-trade have been at least four millions sterling, and
it gives remunerative employment to about 150,000 workpeople.

To return to the personal history of Mr. Heathcoat.  In 1809 we find him
established as a lace-manufacturer at Loughborough, in Leicestershire.
There he carried on a prosperous business for several years, giving
employment to a large number of operatives, at wages varying from 5_l._
to 10_l._ a week.  Notwithstanding the great increase in the number of
hands employed in lace-making through the introduction of the new
machines, it began to be whispered about among the workpeople that they
were superseding labour, and an extensive conspiracy was formed for the
purpose of destroying them wherever found.  As early as the year 1811
disputes arose between the masters and men engaged in the stocking and
lace trades in the south-western parts of Nottinghamshire and the
adjacent parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire, the result of which was
the assembly of a mob at Sutton, in Ashfield, who proceeded in open day
to break the stocking and lace-frames of the manufacturers.  Some of the
ringleaders having been seized and punished, the disaffected learnt
caution; but the destruction of the machines was nevertheless carried on
secretly wherever a safe opportunity presented itself.  As the machines
were of so delicate a construction that a single blow of a hammer
rendered them useless, and as the manufacture was carried on for the most
part in detached buildings, often in private dwellings remote from towns,
the opportunities of destroying them were unusually easy.  In the
neighbourhood of Nottingham, which was the focus of turbulence, the
machine-breakers organized themselves in regular bodies, and held
nocturnal meetings at which their plans were arranged.  Probably with the
view of inspiring confidence, they gave out that they were under the
command of a leader named Ned Ludd, or General Ludd, and hence their
designation of Luddites.  Under this organization machine-breaking was
carried on with great vigour during the winter of 1811, occasioning great
distress, and throwing large numbers of workpeople out of employment.
Meanwhile, the owners of the frames proceeded to remove them from the
villages and lone dwellings in the country, and brought them into
warehouses in the towns for their better protection.

The Luddites seem to have been encouraged by the lenity of the sentences
pronounced on such of their confederates as had been apprehended and
tried; and, shortly after, the mania broke out afresh, and rapidly
extended over the northern and midland manufacturing districts.  The
organization became more secret; an oath was administered to the members
binding them to obedience to the orders issued by the heads of the
confederacy; and the betrayal of their designs was decreed to be death.
All machines were doomed by them to destruction, whether employed in the
manufacture of cloth, calico, or lace; and a reign of terror began which
lasted for years.  In Yorkshire and Lancashire mills were boldly attacked
by armed rioters, and in many cases they were wrecked or burnt; so that
it became necessary to guard them by soldiers and yeomanry.  The masters
themselves were doomed to death; many of them were assaulted, and some
were murdered.  At length the law was vigorously set in motion; numbers
of the misguided Luddites were apprehended; some were executed; and after
several years’ violent commotion from this cause, the machine-breaking
riots were at length quelled.

Among the numerous manufacturers whose works were attacked by the
Luddites, was the inventor of the bobbin-net machine himself.  One bright
sunny day, in the summer of 1816, a body of rioters entered his factory
at Loughborough with torches, and set fire to it, destroying thirty-seven
lace-machines, and above 10,000_l._ worth of property.  Ten of the men
were apprehended for the felony, and eight of them were executed.  Mr.
Heathcoat made a claim upon the county for compensation, and it was
resisted; but the Court of Queen’s Bench decided in his favour, and
decreed that the county must make good his loss of 10,000_l._  The
magistrates sought to couple with the payment of the damage the condition
that Mr. Heathcoat should expend the money in the county of Leicester;
but to this he would not assent, having already resolved on removing his
manufacture elsewhere.  At Tiverton, in Devonshire, he found a large
building which had been formerly used as a woollen manufactory; but the
Tiverton cloth trade having fallen into decay, the building remained
unoccupied, and the town itself was generally in a very poverty-stricken
condition.  Mr. Heathcoat bought the old mill, renovated and enlarged it,
and there recommenced the manufacture of lace upon a larger scale than
before; keeping in full work as many as three hundred machines, and
employing a large number of artisans at good wages.  Not only did he
carry on the manufacture of lace, but the various branches of business
connected with it—yarn-doubling, silk-spinning, net-making, and
finishing.  He also established at Tiverton an iron-foundry and works for
the manufacture of agricultural implements, which proved of great
convenience to the district.  It was a favourite idea of his that steam
power was capable of being applied to perform all the heavy drudgery of
life, and he laboured for a long time at the invention of a steam-plough.
In 1832 he so far completed his invention as to be enabled to take out a
patent for it; and Heathcoat’s steam-plough, though it has since been
superseded by Fowler’s, was considered the best machine of the kind that
had up to that time been invented.

Mr. Heathcoat was a man of great natural gifts.  He possessed a sound
understanding, quick perception, and a genius for business of the highest
order.  With these he combined uprightness, honesty, and
integrity—qualities which are the true glory of human character.  Himself
a diligent self-educator, he gave ready encouragement to deserving youths
in his employment, stimulating their talents and fostering their
energies.  During his own busy life, he contrived to save time to master
French and Italian, of which he acquired an accurate and grammatical
knowledge.  His mind was largely stored with the results of a careful
study of the best literature, and there were few subjects on which he had
not formed for himself shrewd and accurate views.  The two thousand
workpeople in his employment regarded him almost as a father, and he
carefully provided for their comfort and improvement.  Prosperity did not
spoil him, as it does so many; nor close his heart against the claims of
the poor and struggling, who were always sure of his sympathy and help.
To provide for the education of the children of his workpeople, he built
schools for them at a cost of about 6000_l._  He was also a man of
singularly cheerful and buoyant disposition, a favourite with men of all
classes and most admired and beloved by those who knew him best.

In 1831 the electors of Tiverton, of which town Mr. Heathcoat had proved
himself so genuine a benefactor, returned him to represent them in
Parliament, and he continued their member for nearly thirty years.
During a great part of that time he had Lord Palmerston for his
colleague, and the noble lord, on more than one public occasion,
expressed the high regard which he entertained for his venerable friend.
On retiring from the representation in 1859, owing to advancing age and
increasing infirmities, thirteen hundred of his workmen presented him
with a silver inkstand and gold pen, in token of their esteem.  He
enjoyed his leisure for only two more years, dying in January, 1861, at
the age of seventy-seven, and leaving behind him a character for probity,
virtue, manliness, and mechanical genius, of which his descendants may
well be proud.

We next turn to a career of a very different kind, that of the
illustrious but unfortunate Jacquard, whose life also illustrates in a
remarkable manner the influence which ingenious men, even of the humblest
rank, may exercise upon the industry of a nation.  Jacquard was the son
of a hard-working couple of Lyons, his father being a weaver, and his
mother a pattern reader.  They were too poor to give him any but the most
meagre education.  When he was of age to learn a trade, his father placed
him with a book-binder.  An old clerk, who made up the master’s accounts,
gave Jacquard some lessons in mathematics.  He very shortly began to
display a remarkable turn for mechanics, and some of his contrivances
quite astonished the old clerk, who advised Jacquard’s father to put him
to some other trade, in which his peculiar abilities might have better
scope than in bookbinding.  He was accordingly put apprentice to a
cutler; but was so badly treated by his master, that he shortly
afterwards left his employment, on which he was placed with a
type-founder.

His parents dying, Jacquard found himself in a measure compelled to take
to his father’s two looms, and carry on the trade of a weaver.  He
immediately proceeded to improve the looms, and became so engrossed with
his inventions that he forgot his work, and very soon found himself at
the end of his means.  He then sold the looms to pay his debts, at the
same time that he took upon himself the burden of supporting a wife.  He
became still poorer, and to satisfy his creditors, he next sold his
cottage.  He tried to find employment, but in vain, people believing him
to be an idler, occupied with mere dreams about his inventions.  At
length he obtained employment with a line-maker of Bresse, whither he
went, his wife remaining at Lyons, earning a precarious living by making
straw bonnets.

We hear nothing further of Jacquard for some years, but in the interval
he seems to have prosecuted his improvement in the drawloom for the
better manufacture of figured fabrics; for, in 1790, he brought out his
contrivance for selecting the warp threads, which, when added to the
loom, superseded the services of a draw-boy.  The adoption of this
machine was slow but steady, and in ten years after its introduction,
4000 of them were found at work in Lyons.  Jacquard’s pursuits were
rudely interrupted by the Revolution, and, in 1792, we find him fighting
in the ranks of the Lyonnaise Volunteers against the Army of the
Convention under the command of Dubois Crancé.  The city was taken;
Jacquard fled and joined the Army of the Rhine, where he rose to the rank
of sergeant.  He might have remained a soldier, but that, his only son
having been shot dead at his side, he deserted and returned to Lyons to
recover his wife.  He found her in a garret still employed at her old
trade of straw-bonnet making.  While living in concealment with her, his
mind reverted to the inventions over which he had so long brooded in
former years; but he had no means wherewith to prosecute them.  Jacquard
found it necessary, however, to emerge from his hiding-place and try to
find some employment.  He succeeded in obtaining it with an intelligent
manufacturer, and while working by day he went on inventing by night.  It
had occurred to him that great improvements might still be introduced in
looms for figured goods, and he incidentally mentioned the subject one
day to his master, regretting at the same time that his limited means
prevented him from carrying out his ideas.  Happily his master
appreciated the value of the suggestions, and with laudable generosity
placed a sum of money at his disposal, that he might prosecute the
proposed improvements at his leisure.

In three months Jacquard had invented a loom to substitute mechanical
action for the irksome and toilsome labour of the workman.  The loom was
exhibited at the Exposition of National Industry at Paris in 1801, and
obtained a bronze medal.  Jacquard was further honoured by a visit at
Lyons from the Minister Carnot, who desired to congratulate him in person
on the success of his invention.  In the following year the Society of
Arts in London offered a prize for the invention of a machine for
manufacturing fishing-nets and boarding-netting for ships.  Jacquard
heard of this, and while walking one day in the fields according to his
custom, he turned the subject over in his mind, and contrived the plan of
a machine for the purpose.  His friend, the manufacturer, again furnished
him with the means of carrying out his idea, and in three weeks Jacquard
had completed his invention.

Jacquard’s achievement having come to the knowledge of the Prefect of the
Department, he was summoned before that functionary, and, on his
explanation of the working of the machine, a report on the subject was
forwarded to the Emperor.  The inventor was forthwith summoned to Paris
with his machine, and brought into the presence of the Emperor, who
received him with the consideration due to his genius.  The interview
lasted two hours, during which Jacquard, placed at his ease by the
Emperor’s affability, explained to him the improvements which he proposed
to make in the looms for weaving figured goods.  The result was, that he
was provided with apartments in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers,
where he had the use of the workshop during his stay, and was provided
with a suitable allowance for his maintenance.

Installed in the Conservatoire, Jacquard proceeded to complete the
details of his improved loom.  He had the advantage of minutely
inspecting the various exquisite pieces of mechanism contained in that
great treasury of human ingenuity.  Among the machines which more
particularly attracted his attention, and eventually set him upon the
track of his discovery, was a loom for weaving flowered silk, made by
Vaucanson the celebrated automaton-maker.

Vaucanson was a man of the highest order of constructive genius.  The
inventive faculty was so strong in him that it may almost be said to have
amounted to a passion, and could not be restrained.  The saying that the
poet is born, not made, applies with equal force to the inventor, who,
though indebted, like the other, to culture and improved opportunities,
nevertheless contrives and constructs new combinations of machinery
mainly to gratify his own instinct.  This was peculiarly the case with
Vaucanson; for his most elaborate works were not so much distinguished
for their utility as for the curious ingenuity which they displayed.
While a mere boy attending Sunday conversations with his mother, he
amused himself by watching, through the chinks of a partition wall, part
of the movements of a clock in the adjoining apartment.  He endeavoured
to understand them, and by brooding over the subject, after several
months he discovered the principle of the escapement.

From that time the subject of mechanical invention took complete
possession of him.  With some rude tools which he contrived, he made a
wooden clock that marked the hours with remarkable exactness; while he
made for a miniature chapel the figures of some angels which waved their
wings, and some priests that made several ecclesiastical movements.  With
the view of executing some other automata he had designed, he proceeded
to study anatomy, music, and mechanics, which occupied him for several
years.  The sight of the Flute-player in the Gardens of the Tuileries
inspired him with the resolution to invent a similar figure that should
_play_; and after several years’ study and labour, though struggling with
illness, he succeeded in accomplishing his object.  He next produced a
Flageolet-player, which was succeeded by a Duck—the most ingenious of his
contrivances,—which swam, dabbled, drank, and quacked like a real duck.
He next invented an asp, employed in the tragedy of ‘Cléopâtre,’ which
hissed and darted at the bosom of the actress.

Vaucanson, however, did not confine himself merely to the making of
automata.  By reason of his ingenuity, Cardinal de Fleury appointed him
inspector of the silk manufactories of France; and he was no sooner in
office, than with his usual irrepressible instinct to invent, he
proceeded to introduce improvements in silk machinery.  One of these was
his mill for thrown silk, which so excited the anger of the Lyons
operatives, who feared the loss of employment through its means, that
they pelted him with stones and had nearly killed him.  He nevertheless
went on inventing, and next produced a machine for weaving flowered
silks, with a contrivance for giving a dressing to the thread, so as to
render that of each bobbin or skein of an equal thickness.

When Vaucanson died in 1782, after a long illness, he bequeathed his
collection of machines to the Queen, who seems to have set but small
value on them, and they were shortly after dispersed.  But his machine
for weaving flowered silks was happily preserved in the Conservatoire des
Arts et Métiers, and there Jacquard found it among the many curious and
interesting articles in the collection.  It proved of the utmost value to
him, for it immediately set him on the track of the principal
modification which he introduced in his improved loom.

One of the chief features of Vaucanson’s machine was a pierced cylinder
which, according to the holes it presented when revolved, regulated the
movement of certain needles, and caused the threads of the warp to
deviate in such a manner as to produce a given design, though only of a
simple character.  Jacquard seized upon the suggestion with avidity, and,
with the genius of the true inventor, at once proceeded to improve upon
it.  At the end of a month his weaving-machine was completed.  To the
cylinder of Vancanson, he added an endless piece of pasteboard pierced
with a number of holes, through which the threads of the warp were
presented to the weaver; while another piece of mechanism indicated to
the workman the colour of the shuttle which he ought to throw.  Thus the
drawboy and the reader of designs were both at once superseded.  The
first use Jacquard made of his new loom was to weave with it several
yards of rich stuff which he presented to the Empress Josephine.
Napoleon was highly gratified with the result of the inventor’s labours,
and ordered a number of the looms to be constructed by the best workmen,
after Jacquard’s model, and presented to him; after which he returned to
Lyons.

There he experienced the frequent fate of inventors.  He was regarded by
his townsmen as an enemy, and treated by them as Kay, Hargreaves, and
Arkwright had been in Lancashire.  The workmen looked upon the new loom
as fatal to their trade, and feared lest it should at once take the bread
from their mouths.  A tumultuous meeting was held on the Place des
Terreaux, when it was determined to destroy the machines.  This was
however prevented by the military.  But Jacquard was denounced and hanged
in effigy.  The ‘Conseil des prud’hommes’ in vain endeavoured to allay
the excitement, and they were themselves denounced.  At length, carried
away by the popular impulse, the prud’hommes, most of whom had been
workmen and sympathized with the class, had one of Jacquard’s looms
carried off and publicly broken in pieces.  Riots followed, in one of
which Jacquard was dragged along the quay by an infuriated mob intending
to drown him, but he was rescued.

The great value of the Jacquard loom, however, could not be denied, and
its success was only a question of time.  Jacquard was urged by some
English silk manufacturers to pass over into England and settle there.
But notwithstanding the harsh and cruel treatment he had received at the
hands of his townspeople, his patriotism was too strong to permit him to
accept their offer.  The English manufacturers, however, adopted his
loom.  Then it was, and only then, that Lyons, threatened to be beaten
out of the field, adopted it with eagerness; and before long the Jacquard
machine was employed in nearly all kinds of weaving.  The result proved
that the fears of the workpeople had been entirely unfounded.  Instead of
diminishing employment, the Jacquard loom increased it at least tenfold.
The number of persons occupied in the manufacture of figured goods in
Lyons, was stated by M. Leon Faucher to have been 60,000 in 1833; and
that number has since been considerably increased.

As for Jacquard himself, the rest of his life passed peacefully,
excepting that the workpeople who dragged him along the quay to drown him
were shortly after found eager to bear him in triumph along the same
route in celebration of his birthday.  But his modesty would not permit
him to take part in such a demonstration.  The Municipal Council of Lyons
proposed to him that he should devote himself to improving his machine
for the benefit of the local industry, to which Jacquard agreed in
consideration of a moderate pension, the amount of which was fixed by
himself.  After perfecting his invention accordingly, he retired at sixty
to end his days at Oullins, his father’s native place.  It was there that
he received, in 1820, the decoration of the Legion of Honour; and it was
there that he died and was buried in 1834.  A statue was erected to his
memory, but his relatives remained in poverty; and twenty years after his
death, his two nieces were under the necessity of selling for a few
hundred francs the gold medal bestowed upon their uncle by Louis XVIII.
“Such,” says a French writer, “was the gratitude of the manufacturing
interests of Lyons to the man to whom it owes so large a portion of its
splendour.”

It would be easy to extend the martyrology of inventors, and to cite the
names of other equally distinguished men who have, without any
corresponding advantage to themselves, contributed to the industrial
progress of the age,—for it has too often happened that genius has
planted the tree, of which patient dulness has gathered the fruit; but we
will confine ourselves for the present to a brief account of an inventor
of comparatively recent date, by way of illustration of the difficulties
and privations which it is so frequently the lot of mechanical genius to
surmount.  We allude to Joshua Heilmann, the inventor of the Combing
Machine.

Heilmann was born in 1796 at Mulhouse, the principal seat of the Alsace
cotton manufacture.  His father was engaged in that business; and Joshua
entered his office at fifteen.  He remained there for two years,
employing his spare time in mechanical drawing.  He afterwards spent two
years in his uncle’s banking-house in Paris, prosecuting the study of
mathematics in the evenings.  Some of his relatives having established a
small cotton-spinning factory at Mulhouse, young Heilmann was placed with
Messrs. Tissot and Rey, at Paris, to learn the practice of that firm.  At
the same time he became a student at the Conservatoire des Arts et
Métiers, where he attended the lectures, and studied the machines in the
museum.  He also took practical lessons in turning from a toymaker.
After some time, thus diligently occupied, he returned to Alsace, to
superintend the construction of the machinery for the new factory at
Vieux-Thann, which was shortly finished and set to work.  The operations
of the manufactory were, however, seriously affected by a commercial
crisis which occurred, and it passed into other hands, on which Heilmann
returned to his family at Mulhouse.

He had in the mean time been occupying much of his leisure with
inventions, more particularly in connection with the weaving of cotton
and the preparation of the staple for spinning.  One of his earliest
contrivances was an embroidering-machine, in which twenty needles were
employed, working simultaneously; and he succeeded in accomplishing his
object after about six months’ labour.  For this invention, which he
exhibited at the Exposition of 1834, he received a gold medal, and was
decorated with the Legion of Honour.  Other inventions quickly
followed—an improved loom, a machine for measuring and folding fabrics,
an improvement of the “bobbin and fly frames” of the English spinners,
and a weft winding-machine, with various improvements in the machinery
for preparing, spinning, and weaving silk and cotton.  One of his most
ingenious contrivances was his loom for weaving simultaneously two pieces
of velvet or other piled fabric, united by the pile common to both, with
a knife and traversing apparatus for separating the two fabrics when
woven.  But by far the most beautiful and ingenious of his inventions was
the combing-machine, the history of which we now proceed shortly to
describe.

Heilmann had for some years been diligently studying the contrivance of a
machine for combing long-stapled cotton, the ordinary carding-machine
being found ineffective in preparing the raw material for spinning,
especially the finer sorts of yarn, besides causing considerable waste.
To avoid these imperfections, the cotton-spinners of Alsace offered a
prize of 5000 francs for an improved combing-machine, and Heilmann
immediately proceeded to compete for the reward.  He was not stimulated
by the desire of gain, for he was comparatively rich, having acquired a
considerable fortune by his wife.  It was a saying of his that “one will
never accomplish great things who is constantly asking himself, how much
gain will this bring me?”  What mainly impelled him was the irrepressible
instinct of the inventor, who no sooner has a mechanical problem set
before him than he feels impelled to undertake its solution.  The problem
in this case was, however, much more difficult than he had anticipated.
The close study of the subject occupied him for several years, and the
expenses in which he became involved in connection with it were so great,
that his wife’s fortune was shortly swallowed up, and he was reduced to
poverty, without being able to bring his machine to perfection.  From
that time he was under the necessity of relying mainly on the help of his
friends to enable him to prosecute the invention.

While still struggling with poverty and difficulties, Heilmann’s wife
died, believing her husband ruined; and shortly after he proceeded to
England and settled for a time at Manchester, still labouring at his
machine.  He had a model made for him by the eminent machine-makers,
Sharpe, Roberts, and Company; but still he could not make it work
satisfactorily, and he was at length brought almost to the verge of
despair.  He returned to France to visit his family, still pursuing his
idea, which had obtained complete possession of his mind.  While sitting
by his hearth one evening, meditating upon the hard fate of inventors and
the misfortunes in which their families so often become involved, he
found himself almost unconsciously watching his daughters coming their
long hair and drawing it out at full length between their fingers.  The
thought suddenly struck him that if he could successfully imitate in a
machine the process of combing out the longest hair and forcing back the
short by reversing the action of the comb, it might serve to extricate
him from his difficulty.  It may be remembered that this incident in the
life of Heilmann has been made the subject of a beautiful picture by Mr.
Elmore, R.A., which was exhibited at the Royal Academy Exhibition of
1862.

Upon this idea he proceeded, introduced the apparently simple but really
most intricate process of machine-combing, and after great labour he
succeeded in perfecting the invention.  The singular beauty of the
process can only be appreciated by those who have witnessed the machine
at work, when the similarity of its movements to that of combing the
hair, which suggested the invention, is at once apparent.  The machine
has been described as “acting with almost the delicacy of touch of the
human fingers.”  It combs the lock of cotton _at both ends_, places the
fibres exactly parallel with each other, separates the long from the
short, and unites the long fibres in one sliver and the short ones in
another.  In fine, the machine not only acts with the delicate accuracy
of the human fingers, but apparently with the delicate intelligence of
the human mind.

The chief commercial value of the invention consisted in its rendering
the commoner sorts of cotton available for fine spinning.  The
manufacturers were thereby enabled to select the most suitable fibres for
high-priced fabrics, and to produce the finer sorts of yarn in much
larger quantities.  It became possible by its means to make thread so
fine that a length of 334 miles might be spun from a single pound weight
of the prepared cotton, and, worked up into the finer sorts of lace, the
original shilling’s worth of cotton-wool, before it passed into the hands
of the consumer, might thus be increased to the value of between 300_l._
and 400_l._ sterling.

The beauty and utility of Heilmann’s invention were at once appreciated
by the English cotton-spinners.  Six Lancashire firms united and
purchased the patent for cotton-spinning for England for the sum of
30,000_l._; the wool-spinners paid the same sum for the privilege of
applying the process to wool; and the Messrs. Marshall, of Leeds,
20,000_l._ for the privilege of applying it to flax.  Thus wealth
suddenly flowed in upon poor Heilmann at last.  But he did not live to
enjoy it.  Scarcely had his long labours been crowned by success than he
died, and his son, who had shared in his privations, shortly followed
him.

It is at the price of lives such as these that the wonders of
civilisation are achieved.




CHAPTER III.
HE GREAT POTTERS—PALISSY, BÖTTGHER, WEDGWOOD.


    “Patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude, and the
    rarest too . . . Patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well
    as of all powers.  Hope herself ceases to be happiness when
    Impatience companions her.”—_John Ruskin_.

    “Il y a vingt et cinq ans passez qu’il ne me fut monstré une coupe de
    terre, tournée et esmaillée d’une telle beauté que . . . dèslors,
    sans avoir esgard que je n’avois nulle connoissance des terres
    argileuses, je me mis a chercher les émaux, comme un homme qui taste
    en ténèbres.”—_Bernard Palissy_.

IT so happens that the history of Pottery furnishes some of the most
remarkable instances of patient perseverance to be found in the whole
range of biography.  Of these we select three of the most striking, as
exhibited in the lives of Bernard Palissy, the Frenchman; Johann
Friedrich Böttgher, the German; and Josiah Wedgwood, the Englishman.

Though the art of making common vessels of clay was known to most of the
ancient nations, that of manufacturing enamelled earthenware was much
less common.  It was, however, practised by the ancient Etruscans,
specimens of whose ware are still to be found in antiquarian collections.
But it became a lost art, and was only recovered at a comparatively
recent date.  The Etruscan ware was very valuable in ancient times, a
vase being worth its weight in gold in the time of Augustus.  The Moors
seem to have preserved amongst them a knowledge of the art, which they
were found practising in the island of Majorca when it was taken by the
Pisans in 1115. Among the spoil carried away were many plates of Moorish
earthenware, which, in token of triumph, were embedded in the walls of
several of the ancient churches of Pisa, where they are to be seen to
this day.  About two centuries later the Italians began to make an
imitation enamelled ware, which they named Majolica, after the Moorish
place of manufacture.

The reviver or re-discoverer of the art of enamelling in Italy was Luca
della Robbia, a Florentine sculptor.  Vasari describes him as a man of
indefatigable perseverance, working with his chisel all day and
practising drawing during the greater part of the night.  He pursued the
latter art with so much assiduity, that when working late, to prevent his
feet from freezing with the cold, he was accustomed to provide himself
with a basket of shavings, in which he placed them to keep himself warm
and enable him to proceed with his drawings.  “Nor,” says Vasari, “am I
in the least astonished at this, since no man ever becomes distinguished
in any art whatsoever who does not early begin to acquire the power of
supporting heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and other discomforts; whereas
those persons deceive themselves altogether who suppose that when taking
their ease and surrounded by all the enjoyments of the world they may
still attain to honourable distinction,—for it is not by sleeping, but by
waking, watching, and labouring continually, that proficiency is attained
and reputation acquired.”

But Luca, notwithstanding all his application and industry, did not
succeed in earning enough money by sculpture to enable him to live by the
art, and the idea occurred to him that he might nevertheless be able to
pursue his modelling in some material more facile and less dear than
marble.  Hence it was that he began to make his models in clay, and to
endeavour by experiment so to coat and bake the clay as to render those
models durable.  After many trials he at length discovered a method of
covering the clay with a material, which, when exposed to the intense
heat of a furnace, became converted into an almost imperishable enamel.
He afterwards made the further discovery of a method of imparting colour
to the enamel, thus greatly adding to its beauty.

The fame of Luca’s work extended throughout Europe, and specimens of his
art became widely diffused.  Many of them were sent into France and
Spain, where they were greatly prized.  At that time coarse brown jars
and pipkins were almost the only articles of earthenware produced in
France; and this continued to be the case, with comparatively small
improvement, until the time of Palissy—a man who toiled and fought
against stupendous difficulties with a heroism that sheds a glow almost
of romance over the events of his chequered life.

Bernard Palissy is supposed to have been born in the south of France, in
the diocese of Agen, about the year 1510.  His father was probably a
worker in glass, to which trade Bernard was brought up.  His parents were
poor people—too poor to give him the benefit of any school education.  “I
had no other books,” said he afterwards, “than heaven and earth, which
are open to all.”  He learnt, however, the art of glass-painting, to
which he added that of drawing, and afterwards reading and writing.

When about eighteen years old, the glass trade becoming decayed, Palissy
left his father’s house, with his wallet on his back, and went out into
the world to search whether there was any place in it for him.  He first
travelled towards Gascony, working at his trade where he could find
employment, and occasionally occupying part of his time in
land-measuring.  Then he travelled northwards, sojourning for various
periods at different places in France, Flanders, and Lower Germany.

Thus Palissy occupied about ten more years of his life, after which he
married, and ceased from his wanderings, settling down to practise
glass-painting and land-measuring at the small town of Saintes, in the
Lower Charente.  There children were born to him; and not only his
responsibilities but his expenses increased, while, do what he could, his
earnings remained too small for his needs.  It was therefore necessary
for him to bestir himself.  Probably he felt capable of better things
than drudging in an employment so precarious as glass-painting; and hence
he was induced to turn his attention to the kindred art of painting and
enamelling earthenware.  Yet on this subject he was wholly ignorant; for
he had never seen earth baked before he began his operations.  He had
therefore everything to learn by himself, without any helper.  But he was
full of hope, eager to learn, of unbounded perseverance and inexhaustible
patience.

It was the sight of an elegant cup of Italian manufacture—most probably
one of Luca della Robbia’s make—which first set Palissy a-thinking about
the new art.  A circumstance so apparently insignificant would have
produced no effect upon an ordinary mind, or even upon Palissy himself at
an ordinary time; but occurring as it did when he was meditating a change
of calling, he at once became inflamed with the desire of imitating it.
The sight of this cup disturbed his whole existence; and the
determination to discover the enamel with which it was glazed
thenceforward possessed him like a passion.  Had he been a single man he
might have travelled into Italy in search of the secret; but he was bound
to his wife and his children, and could not leave them; so he remained by
their side groping in the dark in the hope of finding out the process of
making and enamelling earthenware.

At first he could merely guess the materials of which the enamel was
composed; and he proceeded to try all manner of experiments to ascertain
what they really were.  He pounded all the substances which he supposed
were likely to produce it.  Then he bought common earthen pots, broke
them into pieces, and, spreading his compounds over them, subjected them
to the heat of a furnace which he erected for the purpose of baking them.
His experiments failed; and the results were broken pots and a waste of
fuel, drugs, time, and labour.  Women do not readily sympathise with
experiments whose only tangible effect is to dissipate the means of
buying clothes and food for their children; and Palissy’s wife, however
dutiful in other respects, could not be reconciled to the purchase of
more earthen pots, which seemed to her to be bought only to be broken.
Yet she must needs submit; for Palissy had become thoroughly possessed by
the determination to master the secret of the enamel, and would not leave
it alone.

For many successive months and years Palissy pursued his experiments.
The first furnace having proved a failure, he proceeded to erect another
out of doors.  There he burnt more wood, spoiled more drugs and pots, and
lost more time, until poverty stared him and his family in the face.
“Thus,” said he, “I fooled away several years, with sorrow and sighs,
because I could not at all arrive at my intention.”  In the intervals of
his experiments he occasionally worked at his former callings, painting
on glass, drawing portraits, and measuring land; but his earnings from
these sources were very small.  At length he was no longer able to carry
on his experiments in his own furnace because of the heavy cost of fuel;
but he bought more potsherds, broke them up as before into three or four
hundred pieces, and, covering them with chemicals, carried them to a
tile-work a league and a half distant from Saintes, there to be baked in
an ordinary furnace.  After the operation he went to see the pieces taken
out; and, to his dismay, the whole of the experiments were failures.  But
though disappointed, he was not yet defeated; for he determined on the
very spot to “begin afresh.”

His business as a land-measurer called him away for a brief season from
the pursuit of his experiments.  In conformity with an edict of the
State, it became necessary to survey the salt-marshes in the
neighbourhood of Saintes for the purpose of levying the land-tax.
Palissy was employed to make this survey, and prepare the requisite map.
The work occupied him some time, and he was doubtless well paid for it;
but no sooner was it completed than he proceeded, with redoubled zeal, to
follow up his old investigations “in the track of the enamels.”  He began
by breaking three dozen new earthen pots, the pieces of which he covered
with different materials which he had compounded, and then took them to a
neighbouring glass-furnace to be baked.  The results gave him a glimmer
of hope.  The greater heat of the glass-furnace had melted some of the
compounds; but though Palissy searched diligently for the white enamel he
could find none.

For two more years he went on experimenting without any satisfactory
result, until the proceeds of his survey of the salt-marshes having
become nearly spent, he was reduced to poverty again.  But he resolved to
make a last great effort; and he began by breaking more pots than ever.
More than three hundred pieces of pottery covered with his compounds were
sent to the glass-furnace; and thither he himself went to watch the
results of the baking.  Four hours passed, during which he watched; and
then the furnace was opened.  The material on _one_ only of the three
hundred pieces of potsherd had melted, and it was taken out to cool.  As
it hardened, it grew white-white and polished!  The piece of potsherd was
covered with white enamel, described by Palissy as “singularly
beautiful!”  And beautiful it must no doubt have been in his eyes after
all his weary waiting.  He ran home with it to his wife, feeling himself,
as he expressed it, quite a new creature.  But the prize was not yet
won—far from it.  The partial success of this intended last effort merely
had the effect of luring him on to a succession of further experiments
and failures.

In order that he might complete the invention, which he now believed to
be at hand, he resolved to build for himself a glass-furnace near his
dwelling, where he might carry on his operations in secret.  He proceeded
to build the furnace with his own hands, carrying the bricks from the
brick-field upon his back.  He was bricklayer, labourer, and all.  From
seven to eight more months passed.  At last the furnace was built and
ready for use.  Palissy had in the mean time fashioned a number of
vessels of clay in readiness for the laying on of the enamel.  After
being subjected to a preliminary process of baking, they were covered
with the enamel compound, and again placed in the furnace for the grand
crucial experiment.  Although his means were nearly exhausted, Palissy
had been for some time accumulating a great store of fuel for the final
effort; and he thought it was enough.  At last the fire was lit, and the
operation proceeded.  All day he sat by the furnace, feeding it with
fuel.  He sat there watching and feeding all through the long night.  But
the enamel did not melt.  The sun rose upon his labours.  His wife
brought him a portion of the scanty morning meal,—for he would not stir
from the furnace, into which he continued from time to time to heave more
fuel.  The second day passed, and still the enamel did not melt.  The sun
set, and another night passed.  The pale, haggard, unshorn, baffled yet
not beaten Palissy sat by his furnace eagerly looking for the melting of
the enamel.  A third day and night passed—a fourth, a fifth, and even a
sixth,—yes, for six long days and nights did the unconquerable Palissy
watch and toil, fighting against hope; and still the enamel would not
melt.

It then occurred to him that there might be some defect in the materials
for the enamel—perhaps something wanting in the flux; so he set to work
to pound and compound fresh materials for a new experiment.  Thus two or
three more weeks passed.  But how to buy more pots?—for those which he
had made with his own hands for the purposes of the first experiment were
by long baking irretrievably spoilt for the purposes of a second.  His
money was now all spent; but he could borrow.  His character was still
good, though his wife and the neighbours thought him foolishly wasting
his means in futile experiments.  Nevertheless he succeeded.  He borrowed
sufficient from a friend to enable him to buy more fuel and more pots,
and he was again ready for a further experiment.  The pots were covered
with the new compound, placed in the furnace, and the fire was again lit.

It was the last and most desperate experiment of the whole.  The fire
blazed up; the heat became intense; but still the enamel did not melt.
The fuel began to run short!  How to keep up the fire?  There were the
garden palings: these would burn.  They must be sacrificed rather than
that the great experiment should fail.  The garden palings were pulled up
and cast into the furnace.  They were burnt in vain!  The enamel had not
yet melted.  Ten minutes more heat might do it.  Fuel must be had at
whatever cost.  There remained the household furniture and shelving.  A
crashing noise was heard in the house; and amidst the screams of his wife
and children, who now feared Palissy’s reason was giving way, the tables
were seized, broken up, and heaved into the furnace.  The enamel had not
melted yet!  There remained the shelving.  Another noise of the wrenching
of timber was heard within the house; and the shelves were torn down and
hurled after the furniture into the fire.  Wife and children then rushed
from the house, and went frantically through the town, calling out that
poor Palissy had gone mad, and was breaking up his very furniture for
firewood! {74}

For an entire month his shirt had not been off his back, and he was
utterly worn out—wasted with toil, anxiety, watching, and want of food.
He was in debt, and seemed on the verge of ruin.  But he had at length
mastered the secret; for the last great burst of heat had melted the
enamel.  The common brown household jars, when taken out of the furnace
after it had become cool, were found covered with a white glaze!  For
this he could endure reproach, contumely, and scorn, and wait patiently
for the opportunity of putting his discovery into practice as better days
came round.

Palissy next hired a potter to make some earthen vessels after designs
which he furnished; while he himself proceeded to model some medallions
in clay for the purpose of enamelling them.  But how to maintain himself
and his family until the wares were made and ready for sale?  Fortunately
there remained one man in Saintes who still believed in the integrity, if
not in the judgment, of Palissy—an inn-keeper, who agreed to feed and
lodge him for six months, while he went on with his manufacture.  As for
the working potter whom he had hired, Palissy soon found that he could
not pay him the stipulated wages.  Having already stripped his dwelling,
he could but strip himself; and he accordingly parted with some of his
clothes to the potter, in part payment of the wages which he owed him.

Palissy next erected an improved furnace, but he was so unfortunate as to
build part of the inside with flints.  When it was heated, these flints
cracked and burst, and the spiculæ were scattered over the pieces of
pottery, sticking to them.  Though the enamel came out right, the work
was irretrievably spoilt, and thus six more months’ labour was lost.
Persons were found willing to buy the articles at a low price,
notwithstanding the injury they had sustained; but Palissy would not sell
them, considering that to have done so would be to “decry and abate his
honour;” and so he broke in pieces the entire batch.  “Nevertheless,”
says he, “hope continued to inspire me, and I held on manfully;
sometimes, when visitors called, I entertained them with pleasantry,
while I was really sad at heart. . . . Worst of all the sufferings I had
to endure, were the mockeries and persecutions of those of my own
household, who were so unreasonable as to expect me to execute work
without the means of doing so.  For years my furnaces were without any
covering or protection, and while attending them I have been for nights
at the mercy of the wind and the rain, without help or consolation, save
it might be the wailing of cats on the one side and the howling of dogs
on the other.  Sometimes the tempest would beat so furiously against the
furnaces that I was compelled to leave them and seek shelter within
doors.  Drenched by rain, and in no better plight than if I had been
dragged through mire, I have gone to lie down at midnight or at daybreak,
stumbling into the house without a light, and reeling from one side to
another as if I had been drunken, but really weary with watching and
filled with sorrow at the loss of my labour after such long toiling.  But
alas! my home proved no refuge; for, drenched and besmeared as I was, I
found in my chamber a second persecution worse than the first, which
makes me even now marvel that I was not utterly consumed by my many
sorrows.”

At this stage of his affairs, Palissy became melancholy and almost
hopeless, and seems to have all but broken down.  He wandered gloomily
about the fields near Saintes, his clothes hanging in tatters, and
himself worn to a skeleton.  In a curious passage in his writings he
describes how that the calves of his legs had disappeared and were no
longer able with the help of garters to hold up his stockings, which fell
about his heels when he walked. {77}  The family continued to reproach
him for his recklessness, and his neighbours cried shame upon him for his
obstinate folly.  So he returned for a time to his former calling; and
after about a year’s diligent labour, during which he earned bread for
his household and somewhat recovered his character among his neighbours,
he again resumed his darling enterprise.  But though he had already spent
about ten years in the search for the enamel, it cost him nearly eight
more years of experimental plodding before he perfected his invention.
He gradually learnt dexterity and certainty of result by experience,
gathering practical knowledge out of many failures.  Every mishap was a
fresh lesson to him, teaching him something new about the nature of
enamels, the qualities of argillaceous earths, the tempering of clays,
and the construction and management of furnaces.

At last, after about sixteen years’ labour, Palissy took heart and called
himself Potter.  These sixteen years had been his term of apprenticeship
to the art; during which he had wholly to teach himself, beginning at the
very beginning.  He was now able to sell his wares and thereby maintain
his family in comfort.  But he never rested satisfied with what he had
accomplished.  He proceeded from one step of improvement to another;
always aiming at the greatest perfection possible.  He studied natural
objects for patterns, and with such success that the great Buffon spoke
of him as “so great a naturalist as Nature only can produce.”  His
ornamental pieces are now regarded as rare gems in the cabinets of
virtuosi, and sell at almost fabulous prices. {78}  The ornaments on them
are for the most part accurate models from life, of wild animals,
lizards, and plants, found in the fields about Saintes, and tastefully
combined as ornaments into the texture of a plate or vase.  When Palissy
had reached the height of his art he styled himself “Ouvrier de Terre et
Inventeur des Rustics Figulines.”

We have not, however, come to an end of the sufferings of Palissy,
respecting which a few words remain to be said.  Being a Protestant, at a
time when religious persecution waxed hot in the south of France, and
expressing his views without fear, he was regarded as a dangerous
heretic.  His enemies having informed against him, his house at Saintes
was entered by the officers of “justice,” and his workshop was thrown
open to the rabble, who entered and smashed his pottery, while he himself
was hurried off by night and cast into a dungeon at Bordeaux, to wait his
turn at the stake or the scaffold.  He was condemned to be burnt; but a
powerful noble, the Constable de Montmorency, interposed to save his
life—not because he had any special regard for Palissy or his religion,
but because no other artist could be found capable of executing the
enamelled pavement for his magnificent château then in course of erection
at Ecouen, about four leagues from Paris.  By his influence an edict was
issued appointing Palissy Inventor of Rustic Figulines to the King and to
the Constable, which had the effect of immediately removing him from the
jurisdiction of Bourdeaux.  He was accordingly liberated, and returned to
his home at Saintes only to find it devastated and broken up. His
workshop was open to the sky, and his works lay in ruins.  Shaking the
dust of Saintes from his feet he left the place never to return to it,
and removed to Paris to carry on the works ordered of him by the
Constable and the Queen Mother, being lodged in the Tuileries {79} while
so occupied.

Besides carrying on the manufacture of pottery, with the aid of his two
sons, Palissy, during the latter part of his life, wrote and published
several books on the potter’s art, with a view to the instruction of his
countrymen, and in order that they might avoid the many mistakes which he
himself had made.  He also wrote on agriculture, on fortification, and
natural history, on which latter subject he even delivered lectures to a
limited number of persons.  He waged war against astrology, alchemy,
witchcraft, and like impostures.  This stirred up against him many
enemies, who pointed the finger at him as a heretic, and he was again
arrested for his religion and imprisoned in the Bastille.  He was now an
old man of seventy-eight, trembling on the verge of the grave, but his
spirit was as brave as ever.  He was threatened with death unless he
recanted; but he was as obstinate in holding to his religion as he had
been in hunting out the secret of the enamel.  The king, Henry III., even
went to see him in prison to induce him to abjure his faith.  “My good
man,” said the King, “you have now served my mother and myself for
forty-five years.  We have put up with your adhering to your religion
amidst fires and massacres: now I am so pressed by the Guise party as
well as by my own people, that I am constrained to leave you in the hands
of your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burnt unless you become
converted.”  “Sire,” answered the unconquerable old man, “I am ready to
give my life for the glory of God.  You have said many times that you
have pity on me; and now I have pity on you, who have pronounced the
words _I am constrained_!  It is not spoken like a king, sire; it is what
you, and those who constrain you, the Guisards and all your people, can
never effect upon me, for I know how to die.” {80a}  Palissy did indeed
die shortly after, a martyr, though not at the stake.  He died in the
Bastille, after enduring about a year’s imprisonment,—there peacefully
terminating a life distinguished for heroic labour, extraordinary
endurance, inflexible rectitude, and the exhibition of many rare and
noble virtues. {80b}

The life of John Frederick Böttgher, the inventor of hard porcelain,
presents a remarkable contrast to that of Palissy; though it also
contains many points of singular and almost romantic interest.  Böttgher
was born at Schleiz, in the Voightland, in 1685, and at twelve years of
age was placed apprentice with an apothecary at Berlin.  He seems to have
been early fascinated by chemistry, and occupied most of his leisure in
making experiments.  These for the most part tended in one direction—the
art of converting common on metals into gold.  At the end of several
years, Böttgher pretended to have discovered the universal solvent of the
alchemists, and professed that he had made gold by its means.  He
exhibited its powers before his master, the apothecary Zörn, and by some
trick or other succeeded in making him and several other witnesses
believe that he had actually converted copper into gold.

The news spread abroad that the apothecary’s apprentice had discovered
the grand secret, and crowds collected about the shop to get a sight of
the wonderful young “gold-cook.”  The king himself expressed a wish to
see and converse with him, and when Frederick I. was presented with a
piece of the gold pretended to have been converted from copper, he was so
dazzled with the prospect of securing an infinite quantity of it—Prussia
being then in great straits for money—that he determined to secure
Böttgher and employ him to make gold for him within the strong fortress
of Spandau.  But the young apothecary, suspecting the king’s intention,
and probably fearing detection, at once resolved on flight, and he
succeeded in getting across the frontier into Saxony.

A reward of a thousand thalers was offered for Böttgher’s apprehension,
but in vain.  He arrived at Wittenberg, and appealed for protection to
the Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus I. (King of Poland), surnamed
“the Strong.”  Frederick was himself very much in want of money at the
time, and he was overjoyed at the prospect of obtaining gold in any
quantity by the aid of the young alchemist.  Böttgher was accordingly
conveyed in secret to Dresden, accompanied by a royal escort.  He had
scarcely left Wittenberg when a battalion of Prussian grenadiers appeared
before the gates demanding the gold-maker’s extradition.  But it was too
late: Böttgher had already arrived in Dresden, where he was lodged in the
Golden House, and treated with every consideration, though strictly
watched and kept under guard.

The Elector, however, must needs leave him there for a time, having to
depart forthwith to Poland, then almost in a state of anarchy.  But,
impatient for gold, he wrote Böttgher from Warsaw, urging him to
communicate the secret, so that he himself might practise the art of
commutation.  The young “gold-cook,” thus pressed, forwarded to Frederick
a small phial containing “a reddish fluid,” which, it was asserted,
changed all metals, when in a molten state, into gold.  This important
phial was taken in charge by the Prince Fürst von Fürstenburg, who,
accompanied by a regiment of Guards, hurried with it to Warsaw.  Arrived
there, it was determined to make immediate trial of the process.  The
King and the Prince locked themselves up in a secret chamber of the
palace, girt themselves about with leather aprons, and like true
“gold-cooks” set to work melting copper in a crucible and afterwards
applying to it the red fluid of Böttgher.  But the result was
unsatisfactory; for notwithstanding all that they could do, the copper
obstinately remained copper.  On referring to the alchemist’s
instructions, however, the King found that, to succeed with the process,
it was necessary that the fluid should be used “in great purity of
heart;” and as his Majesty was conscious of having spent the evening in
very bad company he attributed the failure of the experiment to that
cause.  A second trial was followed by no better results, and then the
King became furious; for he had confessed and received absolution before
beginning the second experiment.

Frederick Augustus now resolved on forcing Böttgher to disclose the
golden secret, as the only means of relief from his urgent pecuniary
difficulties.  The alchemist, hearing of the royal intention, again
determined to fly.  He succeeded in escaping his guard, and, after three
days’ travel, arrived at Ens in Austria, where he thought himself safe.
The agents of the Elector were, however, at his heels; they had tracked
him to the “Golden Stag,” which they surrounded, and seizing him in his
bed, notwithstanding his resistance and appeals to the Austrian
authorities for help, they carried him by force to Dresden.  From this
time he was more strictly watched than ever, and he was shortly after
transferred to the strong fortress of Köningstein.  It was communicated
to him that the royal exchequer was completely empty, and that ten
regiments of Poles in arrears of pay were waiting for his gold.  The King
himself visited him, and told him in a severe tone that if he did not at
once proceed to make gold, he would be hung!  (“_Thu mir zurecht_,
_Böttgher_, _sonst lass ich dich hangen_”).

Years passed, and still Böttgher made no gold; but he was not hung.  It
was reserved for him to make a far more important discovery than the
conversion of copper into gold, namely, the conversion of clay into
porcelain.  Some rare specimens of this ware had been brought by the
Portuguese from China, which were sold for more than their weight in
gold.  Böttgher was first induced to turn his attention to the subject by
Walter von Tschirnhaus, a maker of optical instruments, also an
alchemist.  Tschirnhaus was a man of education and distinction, and was
held in much esteem by Prince Fürstenburg as well as by the Elector.  He
very sensibly said to Böttgher, still in fear of the gallows—“If you
can’t make gold, try and do something else; make porcelain.”

The alchemist acted on the hint, and began his experiments, working night
and day.  He prosecuted his investigations for a long time with great
assiduity, but without success.  At length some red clay, brought to him
for the purpose of making his crucibles, set him on the right track.  He
found that this clay, when submitted to a high temperature, became
vitrified and retained its shape; and that its texture resembled that of
porcelain, excepting in colour and opacity.  He had in fact accidentally
discovered red porcelain, and he proceeded to manufacture it and sell it
as porcelain.

Böttgher was, however, well aware that the white colour was an essential
property of true porcelain; and he therefore prosecuted his experiments
in the hope of discovering the secret.  Several years thus passed, but
without success; until again accident stood his friend, and helped him to
a knowledge of the art of making white porcelain.  One day, in the year
1707, he found his perruque unusually heavy, and asked of his valet the
reason.  The answer was, that it was owing to the powder with which the
wig was dressed, which consisted of a kind of earth then much used for
hair powder.  Böttgher’s quick imagination immediately seized upon the
idea.  This white earthy powder might possibly be the very earth of which
he was in search—at all events the opportunity must not be let slip of
ascertaining what it really was.  He was rewarded for his painstaking
care and watchfulness; for he found, on experiment, that the principal
ingredient of the hair-powder consisted of _kaolin_, the want of which
had so long formed an insuperable difficulty in the way of his inquiries.

The discovery, in Böttgher’s intelligent hands, led to great results, and
proved of far greater importance than the discovery of the philosopher’s
stone would have been.  In October, 1707, he presented his first piece of
porcelain to the Elector, who was greatly pleased with it; and it was
resolved that Böttgher should be furnished with the means necessary for
perfecting his invention.  Having obtained a skilled workman from Delft,
he began to _turn_ porcelain with great success.  He now entirely
abandoned alchemy for pottery, and inscribed over the door of his
workshop this distich:—

    “_Es machte Gott_, _der grosse Schöpfer_,
    _Aus einem Goldmacher einen Töpfer_.” {84}

Böttgher, however, was still under strict surveillance, for fear lest he
should communicate his secret to others or escape the Elector’s control.
The new workshops and furnaces which were erected for him, were guarded
by troops night and day, and six superior officers were made responsible
for the personal security of the potter.

Böttgher’s further experiments with his new furnaces proving very
successful, and the porcelain which he manufactured being found to fetch
large prices, it was next determined to establish a Royal Manufactory of
porcelain.  The manufacture of delft ware was known to have greatly
enriched Holland.  Why should not the manufacture of porcelain equally
enrich the Elector?  Accordingly, a decree went forth, dated the 23rd of
January, 1710, for the establishment of “a large manufactory of
porcelain” at the Albrechtsburg in Meissen.  In this decree, which was
translated into Latin, French, and Dutch, and distributed by the
Ambassadors of the Elector at all the European Courts, Frederick Augustus
set forth that to promote the welfare of Saxony, which had suffered much
through the Swedish invasion, he had “directed his attention to the
subterranean treasures (_unterirdischen Schätze_)” of the country, and
having employed some able persons in the investigation, they had
succeeded in manufacturing “a sort of red vessels (_eine Art rother
Gefässe_) far superior to the Indian terra sigillata;” {85} as also
“coloured ware and plates (_buntes Geschirr und Tafeln_) which may be
cut, ground, and polished, and are quite equal to Indian vessels,” and
finally that “specimens of white porcelain (_Proben von weissem
Porzellan_)” had already been obtained, and it was hoped that this
quality, too, would soon be manufactured in considerable quantities.  The
royal decree concluded by inviting “foreign artists and handicraftmen” to
come to Saxony and engage as assistants in the new factory, at high
wages, and under the patronage of the King.  This royal edict probably
gives the best account of the actual state of Böttgher’s invention at the
time.

It has been stated in German publications that Böttgher, for the great
services rendered by him to the Elector and to Saxony, was made Manager
of the Royal Porcelain Works, and further promoted to the dignity of
Baron.  Doubtless he deserved these honours; but his treatment was of an
altogether different character, for it was shabby, cruel, and inhuman.
Two royal officials, named Matthieu and Nehmitz, were put over his head
as directors of the factory, while he himself only held the position of
foreman of potters, and at the same time was detained the King’s
prisoner.  During the erection of the factory at Meissen, while his
assistance was still indispensable, he was conducted by soldiers to and
from Dresden; and even after the works were finished, he was locked up
nightly in his room.  All this preyed upon his mind, and in repeated
letters to the King he sought to obtain mitigation of his fate.  Some of
these letters are very touching.  “I will devote my whole soul to the art
of making porcelain,” he writes on one occasion, “I will do more than any
inventor ever did before; only give me liberty, liberty!”

To these appeals, the King turned a deaf ear.  He was ready to spend
money and grant favours; but liberty he would not give.  He regarded
Böttgher as his slave.  In this position, the persecuted man kept on
working for some time, till, at the end of a year or two, he grew
negligent.  Disgusted with the world and with himself, he took to
drinking.  Such is the force of example, that it no sooner became known
that Böttgher had betaken himself to this vice, than the greater number
of the workmen at the Meissen factory became drunkards too.  Quarrels and
fightings without end were the consequence, so that the troops were
frequently called upon to interfere and keep peace among the
“Porzellanern,” as they were nicknamed.  After a while, the whole of
them, more than three hundred, were shut up in the Albrechtsburg, and
treated as prisoners of state.

Böttgher at last fell seriously ill, and in May, 1713, his dissolution
was hourly expected.  The King, alarmed at losing so valuable a slave,
now gave him permission to take carriage exercise under a guard; and,
having somewhat recovered, he was allowed occasionally to go to Dresden.
In a letter written by the King in April, 1714, Böttgher was promised his
full liberty; but the offer came too late.  Broken in body and mind,
alternately working and drinking, though with occasional gleams of nobler
intention, and suffering under constant ill-health, the result of his
enforced confinement, Böttgher lingered on for a few years more, until
death freed him from his sufferings on the 13th March, 1719, in the
thirty-fifth year of his age.  He was buried _at night_—as if he had been
a dog—in the Johannis Cemetery of Meissen.  Such was the treatment and
such the unhappy end, of one of Saxony’s greatest benefactors.

The porcelain manufacture immediately opened up an important source of
public revenue, and it became so productive to the Elector of Saxony,
that his example was shortly after followed by most European monarchs.
Although soft porcelain had been made at St. Cloud fourteen years before
Böttgher’s discovery, the superiority of the hard porcelain soon became
generally recognised.  Its manufacture was begun at Sèvres in 1770, and
it has since almost entirely superseded the softer material.  This is now
one of the most thriving branches of French industry, of which the high
quality of the articles produced is certainly indisputable.

The career of Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter, was less chequered and
more prosperous than that of either Palissy or Böttgher, and his lot was
cast in happier times.  Down to the middle of last century England was
behind most other nations of the first order in Europe in respect of
skilled industry.  Although there were many potters in Staffordshire—and
Wedgwood himself belonged to a numerous clan of potters of the same
name—their productions were of the rudest kind, for the most part only
plain brown ware, with the patterns scratched in while the clay was wet.
The principal supply of the better articles of earthenware came from
Delft in Holland, and of drinking stone pots from Cologne.  Two foreign
potters, the brothers Elers from Nuremberg, settled for a time in
Staffordshire, and introduced an improved manufacture, but they shortly
after removed to Chelsea, where they confined themselves to the
manufacture of ornamental pieces.  No porcelain capable of resisting a
scratch with a hard point had yet been made in England; and for a long
time the “white ware” made in Staffordshire was not white, but of a dirty
cream colour.  Such, in a few words, was the condition of the pottery
manufacture when Josiah Wedgwood was born at Burslem in 1730.  By the
time that he died, sixty-four years later, it had become completely
changed.  By his energy, skill, and genius, he established the trade upon
a new and solid foundation; and, in the words of his epitaph, “converted
a rude and inconsiderable manufacture into an elegant art and an
important branch of national commerce.”

Josiah Wedgwood was one of those indefatigable men who from time to time
spring from the ranks of the common people, and by their energetic
character not only practically educate the working population in habits
of industry, but by the example of diligence and perseverance which they
set before them, largely influence the public activity in all directions,
and contribute in a great degree to form the national character.  He was,
like Arkwright, the youngest of a family of thirteen children.  His
grandfather and granduncle were both potters, as was also his father who
died when he was a mere boy, leaving him a patrimony of twenty pounds.
He had learned to read and write at the village school; but on the death
of his father he was taken from it and set to work as a “thrower” in a
small pottery carried on by his elder brother.  There he began life, his
working life, to use his own words, “at the lowest round of the ladder,”
when only eleven years old.  He was shortly after seized by an attack of
virulent smallpox, from the effects of which he suffered during the rest
of his life, for it was followed by a disease in the right knee, which
recurred at frequent intervals, and was only got rid of by the amputation
of the limb many years later.  Mr. Gladstone, in his eloquent Éloge on
Wedgwood recently delivered at Burslem, well observed that the disease
from which he suffered was not improbably the occasion of his subsequent
excellence.  “It prevented him from growing up to be the active, vigorous
English workman, possessed of all his limbs, and knowing right well the
use of them; but it put him upon considering whether, as he could not be
that, he might not be something else, and something greater.  It sent his
mind inwards; it drove him to meditate upon the laws and secrets of his
art.  The result was, that he arrived at a perception and a grasp of them
which might, perhaps, have been envied, certainly have been owned, by an
Athenian potter.” {89}

When he had completed his apprenticeship with his brother, Josiah joined
partnership with another workman, and carried on a small business in
making knife-hafts, boxes, and sundry articles for domestic use.  Another
partnership followed, when he proceeded to make melon table plates, green
pickle leaves, candlesticks, snuffboxes, and such like articles; but he
made comparatively little progress until he began business on his own
account at Burslem in the year 1759.  There he diligently pursued his
calling, introducing new articles to the trade, and gradually extending
his business.  What he chiefly aimed at was to manufacture cream-coloured
ware of a better quality than was then produced in Staffordshire as
regarded shape, colour, glaze, and durability.  To understand the subject
thoroughly, he devoted his leisure to the study of chemistry; and he made
numerous experiments on fluxes, glazes, and various sorts of clay.  Being
a close inquirer and accurate observer, he noticed that a certain earth
containing silica, which was black before calcination, became white after
exposure to the heat of a furnace.  This fact, observed and pondered on,
led to the idea of mixing silica with the red powder of the potteries,
and to the discovery that the mixture becomes white when calcined.  He
had but to cover this material with a vitrification of transparent glaze,
to obtain one of the most important products of fictile art—that which,
under the name of English earthenware, was to attain the greatest
commercial value and become of the most extensive utility.

Wedgwood was for some time much troubled by his furnaces, though nothing
like to the same extent that Palissy was; and he overcame his
difficulties in the same way—by repeated experiments and unfaltering
perseverance.  His first attempts at making porcelain for table use was a
succession of disastrous failures,—the labours of months being often
destroyed in a day.  It was only after a long series of trials, in the
course of which he lost time, money, and labour, that he arrived at the
proper sort of glaze to be used; but he would not be denied, and at last
he conquered success through patience.  The improvement of pottery became
his passion, and was never lost sight of for a moment.  Even when he had
mastered his difficulties, and become a prosperous man—manufacturing
white stone ware and cream-coloured ware in large quantities for home and
foreign use—he went forward perfecting his manufactures, until, his
example extending in all directions, the action of the entire district
was stimulated, and a great branch of British industry was eventually
established on firm foundations.  He aimed throughout at the highest
excellence, declaring his determination “to give over manufacturing any
article, whatsoever it might be, rather than to degrade it.”

Wedgwood was cordially helped by many persons of rank and influence; for,
working in the truest spirit, he readily commanded the help and
encouragement of other true workers.  He made for Queen Charlotte the
first royal table-

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