Chapter VI: Part 6

But here again we see that hardship does not so radically injure a child as unwise indulgence. At fifteen he entered as a clerk into the warehouse of an uncle in London, an uncomfortable place, from which, however, he derived substantial advantages. The great city itself was half an education to him. He learned French in the morning before going to business. He bought cheap and good little books which are thrust upon the sight of every passer-by in cities, and, particularly, he obtained a clear insight into the business of his uncle, who was a wholesale dealer in muslins and calicoes.

From clerk he was advanced to the post of commercial traveler, an employment which most keenly gratified his desire to see the world. This was in 1826, before the days of the railroad, when commercial travelers usually drove their own gigs. The ardent Cobden accomplished his average of forty miles a day, which was then considered very rapid work. He traversed many parts of Great Britain, and not only increased his knowledge of the business, but found time to observe the natural beauties of his country, and to inspect its ancient monuments. He spent two or three years in this mode of life, being already the chief support of his numerous and unusually helpless family.

At the early age of twenty-four he thought the time had come for him to sell his calicoes and muslins on his own account. Two friends in the same business and himself put together their small capitals, amounting to five hundred pounds, borrowed another five hundred, rode to Manchester on the top of the coach named the Peveril of the Peak, boldly asked credit from a wealthy firm of calico manufacturers, obtained it, and launched into business. It proved to be a good thing for them all. In two years the young men were selling fifty or sixty thousand pounds' worth of the old men's calicoes every six months. In after years Cobden often asked them how they could have the courage to trust to such an extent three young fellows not worth two hundred pounds apiece. Their answer was:--

"We always prefer to trust young men with connections and with a knowledge of their trade, if we know them to possess character and ability, to those who start with capital without these advantages, and we have acted on this principle successfully in all parts of the world."

The young firm gained money with astonishing rapidity, one presiding over the warehouse in London, one remaining in Manchester, and the other free to go wherever the interests of the firm required. Cobden visited France and the United States. He was here in 1835, when he thought the American people were the vainest in the world of their country. He said it was almost impossible to praise America enough to satisfy the people. He evidently did not think much of us then. American men, he thought, were a most degenerate race. And as for the women:--

"My eyes," said he, "have not found one resting place that deserves to be called a wholesome, blooming, pretty woman, since I have been here. One fourth part of the women look as if they had just recovered from a fit of the jaundice, another quarter would in England be termed in a stage of decided consumption, and the remainder are fitly likened to our fashionable women when haggard and jaded with the dissipation of a London season."

This was forty-nine years ago. Let us hope that we have improved since then. I think I could now find some American ladies to whom no part of this description would apply.

After a prosperous business career of a few years he left its details more and more to his partners, and devoted himself to public affairs.

Richard Cobden, I repeat, was a public man by nature. He belonged to what I call the natural nobility of a country; by which I mean the individuals, whether poor or rich, high or low, learned or unlearned, who have a true public spirit, and take care of the public weal. As soon as he was free from the trammels of poverty he fell into the habit of taking extensive journeys into foreign countries, a thing most instructive and enlarging to a genuine nobleman. His first public act was the publication of a pamphlet called, "England, Ireland and America," in which he maintained that American institutions and the general policy of the American government were sound, and could safely be followed; particularly in two respects, in maintaining only a very small army and navy, and having no entangling alliances with other countries.

"Civilization," said the young pamphleteer, "is _peace_; war is barbarism. If the great states should devote to the development of business and the amelioration of the common lot only a small part of the treasure expended upon armaments, humanity would not have long to wait for glorious results."

He combated with great force the ancient notion that England must interfere in the politics of the continent; and if England was not embroiled in the horrible war between Russia and Turkey, she owes it in part to Richard Cobden. He wrote also a pamphlet containing the results of his observations upon Russia, in which he denied that Russia was as rich as was generally supposed. He was the first to discover what all the world now knows, that Russia is a vast but poor country, not to be feared by neighboring nations, powerful to defend herself, but weak to attack. In a word, he adopted a line of argument with regard to Russia very similar to that recently upheld by Mr. Gladstone. Like a true American, he was a devoted friend to universal education, and it was in connection with this subject that he first appeared as a public speaker. Mr. Bright said in his oration:--

"The first time I became acquainted with Mr. Cobden was in connection with the great question of education. I went over to Manchester to call upon him and invite him to Rochdale to speak at a meeting about to be held in the school-room of the Baptist chapel in West Street. I found him in his counting-house. I told him what I wanted. His countenance lighted up with pleasure to find that others were working in the same cause. He without hesitation agreed to come. He came and he spoke."

Persons who heard him in those days say that his speaking then was very much what it was afterward in Parliament--a kind of conversational eloquence, simple, clear, and strong, without rhetorical flights, but strangely persuasive. One gentleman who was in Parliament with him mentioned that he disliked to see him get up to speak, because he was sure that Cobden would convince him that his own opinion was erroneous; "and," said he, "a man does not like that to be done."

Soon after coming upon the stage of active life, he had arrived at the conclusion that the public policy of his country was fatally erroneous in two particulars, namely, the protective system of duties, and the habit of interfering in the affairs of other nations. At that time even the food of the people, their very bread and meat, was shopped at the custom houses until a high duty was paid upon them, for the "protection" of the farmers and landlords. In other words, the whole population of Great Britain was taxed at every meal, for the supposed benefit of two classes, those who owned and those who tilled the soil.

Richard Cobden believed that the policy of protection was not beneficial even to the protected classes, while it was most cruel to people whose wages were barely sufficient to keep them alive. For several years, aided by Mr. Bright and many other enlightened men, he labored by tongue and pen, with amazing tact, vigor, persistence, and good temper, to convince his countrymen of this.

The great achievement of his life, as all the world knows, was the repeal of those oppressive Corn Laws by which the duty on grain rose as the price declined, so that the poor man's loaf was kept dear, however abundant and cheap wheat might be in Europe and America. It was in a time of deep depression of trade that he began the agitation. He called upon Mr. Bright to enlist his coöperation, and he found him overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his wife, lying dead in the house at the time. Mr. Cobden consoled his friend as best he could; and yet even at such a time he could not forget his mission. He said to Mr. Bright:--

"There are thousands and thousands of homes in England at this moment, where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger! Now when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest until the Corn Laws are repealed."

Mr. Bright joined him. The Anti-Corn-Law-League was formed; such an agitation was made as has seldom been paralleled; but, so difficult is it to effect a change of this kind against _interested_ votes, that, after all, the Irish famine was necessary to effect the repeal. As a writer remarks:--

"It was hunger that at last ate through those stone walls of protection!"

Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, a protectionist, as we may say, from his birth, yielded to circumstances as much as to argument, and accomplished the repeal in 1846. When the great work was done, and done, too, with benefit to every class, he publicly assigned the credit of the measure to the persuasive eloquence and the indomitable resolution of Richard Cobden.

Mr. Cobden's public labors withdrew his attention from his private business, and he became embarrassed. His friends made a purse for him of eighty thousand pounds sterling, with which to set him up as a public man. He accepted the gift, bought back the farm upon which he was born, and devoted himself without reserve to the public service. During our war he was the friend and champion of the United States, and he owed his premature death to his zeal and friendly regard for this country. There was a ridiculous scheme coming up in Parliament for a line of fortresses to defend Canada against the United States. On one of the coldest days of March he went to London for the sole purpose of speaking against this project. He took a violent cold, under which he sank. He died on that Sunday, the second of April, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln, with a portion of General Grant's army, entered the city of Richmond. It was a strange coincidence. Through four years he had steadily foretold such an ending to the struggle; but though he lived to see the great day he breathed his last a few hours before the news reached the British shore.

There is not in Great Britain, as Mr. Bright observed, a poor man's home that has not in it a bigger and a better loaf through Richard Cobden's labors. His great measure relieved the poor, and relieved the rich. It was a good without alloy, as free trade will, doubtless, be to all nations when their irrepressible Cobdens and their hungry workmen force them to adopt it.

The time is not distant when we, too, shall be obliged, as a people, to meet this question of Free Trade and Protection. In view of that inevitable discussion I advise young voters to study Cobden and Bright, as well as men of the opposite school, and make up their minds on the great question of the future.

HENRY BESSEMER.

Nervous persons who ride in sleeping-cars are much indebted to Henry Bessemer, to whose inventive genius they owe the beautiful steel rails over which the cars glide so steadily. It was he who so simplified and cheapened the process of making steel that it can be used for rails.

Nine people in ten, I suppose, do not know the chemical difference between iron and steel. Iron is iron; but steel is iron mixed with carbon. But, then, what is carbon? There is no substance in nature of which you can pick up a piece and say, This is carbon. And hence it is difficult to explain its nature and properties. Carbon is the principal ingredient in coal, charcoal, and diamond. Carbon is not diamond, but a diamond is carbon crystallized. Carbon is not charcoal, but in some kinds of charcoal it is almost the whole mass. As crystallized carbon or diamond is the hardest of all known substances, so also the blending of carbon with iron hardens it into steel.

The old way of converting iron into steel was slow, laborious, and expensive. In India for ages the process has been as follows: pieces of forged iron are put into a crucible along with a certain quantity of wood. A fire being lighted underneath, three or four men are incessantly employed in blowing it with bellows. Through the action of the heat the wood becomes charcoal, the iron is melted and absorbs carbon from the charcoal. In this way small pieces of steel were made, but made at a cost which confined the use of the article to small objects, such as watch-springs and cutlery. The plan pursued in Europe and America, until about twenty-five years ago, was similar to this in principle. Our machinery was better, and pure charcoal was placed in the crucible instead of wood; but the process was long and costly, and only small pieces of steel were produced at a time.

Henry Bessemer enters upon the scene. In 1831, being then eighteen years of age, he came up to London from a country village in Hertfordshire to seek his fortune, not knowing one person in the metropolis. He was, as he has since said, "a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise." He was a natural inventor, of studious and observant habits. As soon as he had obtained a footing in London he began to invent. He first devised a process for copying bas-reliefs on cardboard, by which he could produce embossed copies of such works in thousands at a small expense. The process was so simple that in ten minutes a person without skill could produce a die from an embossed stamp at a cost of one penny.

When his invention was complete he thought with dismay and alarm that, as almost all the expensive stamps affixed to documents in England are raised from the paper, any of them could be forged by an office-boy of average intelligence. The English government has long obtained an important part of its revenue by the sale of these stamps, many of which are high priced, costing as much as twenty-five dollars. If the stamp on a will, a deed, or other document is not genuine, the document has no validity. As soon as he found what mischief had been done, he set to work to devise a remedy. After several months' experiment and reflection he invented a stamp which could neither be forged nor removed from the document and used a second time. A large business, it seems, had been done in removing stamps from old parchments of no further use, and selling them to be used again.

The inventor called at the stamp office and had an interview with the chief, who frankly owned that the government was losing half a million dollars a year by the use of old stamps; and he was then considering methods of avoiding the loss. Bessemer exhibited his invention, the chief feature of which was the perforation of the stamp in such a way that forgery and removal were equally impossible. The commissioner finally agreed to adopt it. The next question was as to the compensation of the young inventor, and he was given his choice either to accept a sum of money or an office for life in the stamp office of four thousand dollars a year. As he was engaged to be married, he chose the office, and went home rejoicing, feeling that he was a made man. Nor did he long delay to communicate the joyful news to the young lady. To her also he explained his invention, dwelling upon the fact that a five-pound stamp a hundred years old could be taken off a document and used a second time.

"Yes," said she, "I understand that; but, surely, if all stamps had a DATE put upon them they could not at a future time be used again without detection."

The inventor was startled. He had never thought of an expedient so simple and so obvious. A lover could not but be pleased at such ingenuity in his affianced bride; but it spoiled his invention! His perforated stamp did not allow of the insertion of more than one date. He succeeded in obviating this difficulty, but deemed it only fair to communicate the new idea to the chief of the stamp office. The result was that the government simply adopted the plan of putting a date upon all the stamps afterwards issued, and discarded Bessemer's fine scheme of perforation, which would have involved an expensive and troublesome change of machinery and methods. But the worst of it was that the inventor lost his office, since his services were not needed. Nor did he ever receive compensation for the service rendered.

Thus it was that a young lady changed the stamp system of her country, and ruined her lover's chances of getting a good office. She rendered him, however, and rendered the world, a much greater service in throwing him upon his own resources. They were married soon after, and Mrs. Bessemer is still living to tell how she married and made her husband's fortune.

Twenty years passed, with the varied fortune which young men of energy and talent often experience in this troublesome world. We find him then experimenting in the conversion of iron into steel. The experiments were laborious as well as costly, since his idea was to convert at one operation many tons' weight of iron into steel, and in a few minutes. As iron ore contains carbon, he conceived the possibility of making that carbon unite with the iron during the very process of smelting. For nearly two years he was building furnaces and pulling them down again, spending money and toil with just enough success to lure him on to spend more money and toil; experimenting sometimes with ten pounds of iron ore, and sometimes with several hundredweight. His efforts were at length crowned with such success that he was able to make five tons of steel at a blast, in about thirty-five minutes, with comparatively simple machinery, and with a very moderate expenditure of fuel.

This time he took the precaution to patent his process, and offered rights to all the world at a royalty of a shilling per hundredweight. His numerous failures, however, had discouraged the iron men, and no one would embark capital in the new process. He therefore began himself the manufacture of steel on a small scale, and with such large profit, that the process was rapidly introduced into all the iron-making countries, and gave Mrs. Bessemer ample consolation for her early misfortune of being too wise. Money and gold medals have rained in upon them. At the French Exhibition of 1868 Mr. Bessemer was awarded a gold medal weighing twelve ounces. His process has been improved upon both by himself and others, and has conferred upon all civilized countries numerous and solid benefits. We may say of him that he has added to the resources of many trades a new material.

The latest device of Henry Bessemer, if it had succeeded, would have been a great comfort to the Marquis of Lorne and other persons of weak digestion who cross the ocean. It was a scheme for suspending the cabin of a ship so that it should swing free and remain stationary, no matter how violent the ship's motion. The idea seems promising, but we have not yet heard of the establishment of a line of steamers constructed on the Bessemer principle. We may yet have the pleasure of swinging from New York to Liverpool.

JOHN BRIGHT.

MANUFACTURER.

Forty-five years ago, when John Bright was first elected to the British Parliament, he spoke thus to his constituents:--

"I am a working man as much as you. My father was as poor as any man in this crowd. He was of your own body entirely. He boasts not, nor do I, of birth, nor of great family distinctions. What he has made, he has made by his own industry and successful commerce. What I have comes from him and from my own exertions. I come before you as the friend of my own class and order, as one of the people."

When these words were spoken, his father, Jacob Bright, a Quaker, and the son of a Quaker, was still alive, a thriving cotton manufacturer of Rochdale, ten miles from Manchester. Jacob Bright had been a "Good Apprentice," who married one of the daughters of his master, and had been admitted as a partner in his business. He was a man of much force and ability, who became in a few years the practical head of the concern, finally its sole proprietor, and left it to his sons, who have carried it on with success for about half a century longer.

John Bright. August 10. 1883]

Four years ago, on the celebration of John Bright's seventieth birthday, he stood face to face with fifteen hundred persons in the employment of his firm, and repeated in substance what he had said once before, that, during the seventy-three years of the firm's existence, there had been, with one brief exception, uninterrupted harmony and confidence between his family and those who had worked for them.

He made another remark on that birthday which explains a great deal in his career. It was of particular interest to me, because I have long been convinced that no man can give himself up to the service of the public, with advantage to the public, and safety to himself, unless he is practically free from the burdens and trammels of private business.

"I have been greatly fortunate," said Mr. Bright, "in one respect--that, although connected with a large and increasing and somewhat intricate business, yet I have been permitted to be free from the employments and engagements and occupations of business by the constant and undeviating generosity and kindness of my brother, Thomas Bright."

The tribute was well deserved. Certainly, no individual can successfully direct the industry of fifteen hundred persons, and spend six months of the year in London, working night and day as a member of Parliament. Richard Cobden tried it, and brought a flourishing business to ruin by the attempt, and probably shortened his own life. Even with the aid rendered him by his brother, Mr. Bright was obliged to withdraw from public life for three years in order to restore an exhausted brain.

John Bright enjoyed just the kind of education in his youth which experience has shown to be the best for the development of a leader of men. At fifteen, after attending pretty good Quaker schools in the country, where, besides spelling and arithmetic, he learned how to swim, to fish, and to love nature, he came home, went into his father's factory, and became a man of business. He had acquired at school love of literature, particularly of poetry, which he continued to indulge during his leisure hours. You will seldom hear Mr. Bright speak twenty minutes without hearing him make an apt and most telling quotation from one of the poets. He possesses in an eminent degree the talent of quotation, which is one of the happiest gifts of the popular orator. It is worthy of note that this manufacturer, this man of the people, this Manchester man, shows a familiarity with the more dainty, outlying, recondite literature of the world than is shown by any other member of a house composed chiefly of college-bred men.

In his early days he belonged to a debating society, spoke at temperance meetings, was an ardent politician, and, in short, had about the sort of training which an American young man of similar cast of mind would have enjoyed. John Bright, in fact, is one of that numerous class of Americans whom the accident of birth and the circumstances of their lot have prevented from treading the soil of America. In his debating society he had good practice in public speaking, and on all questions took what we may justly call _the Quaker side_, _i. e._, the side which he thought had most in it of humanity and benevolence. He sided against capital punishment, against the established church, and defended the principle of equal toleration of all religions.

Next to Mr. Gladstone, the most admired speaker in Great Britain is John Bright, and there are those who even place him first among the living orators of his country. His published speeches reveal to us only part of the secret of his power, for an essential part of the equipment of an orator is his bodily attributes, his voice, depth of chest, eye, demeanor, presence.

The youngest portrait of him which has been published represents him as he was at the age of thirty-one. If an inch or two could have been added to his stature he would have been as perfect a piece of flesh and blood as can ordinarily be found. His face was strikingly handsome, and bore the impress both of power and of serenity. It was a well-balanced face; there being a full development of the lower portion without any bull-dog excess. His voice was sonorous and commanding; his manner tranquil and dignified. As he was never a student at either university, he did not acquire the Cambridge nor the Oxford sing-song, but has always spoken the English language as distinctly and naturally as though he were a native American citizen.

Although of Quaker family, and himself a member of the Society of Friends, he has never used the Quaker _thee_ and _thou_, nor persisted in wearing his hat where other men take off theirs. In the House of Commons he conforms to the usages of the place, and speaks of "the noble lord opposite," and "my right honorable friend near me," just as though the Quakers never had borne their testimony against such vanity. In his dress, too, there is only the faintest intimation of the Quaker cut. He is a Quaker in his abhorrence of war and in his feeling of the substantial equality of men. He is a Quaker in those few sublime principles in which the Quakers, two centuries ago, were three centuries in advance of the time.

For the benefit of young orators, I will mention also that he has taken excellent care of his bodily powers. As a young man he was a noted cricketer and an enthusiastic angler. At all periods of his life he has played a capital game at billiards. Angling, however, has been his favorite recreation, and he has fished in almost all the good streams of the northern part of his native island.

Nor does he find it necessary to carry a brandy flask with him on his fishing excursions. He mentioned some time ago, at a public meeting, that he had been a tee-totaler from the time when he set up housekeeping thirty-four years before. He said he had in his house no decanters, and, so far as he knew, no wineglasses.

Edward Everett used to say that a speaker's success before an audience depended chiefly upon the thoroughness of his previous preparation. Mr. Bright has often spoken extempore with great effect, when circumstances demanded it. But his custom is to prepare carefully, and in his earlier days he used frequently to write his speech and learn it by heart. He received his first lesson in oratory from a Baptist clergyman of great note, whom he accompanied to a meeting of the Bible Society, and who afterwards gave an account of their conversation. John Bright was then twenty-one years of age.

"Soon a slender, modest young gentleman came, who surprised me by his intelligence and thoughtfulness. I took his arm on the way to the meeting, and I thought he seemed nervous. I think it was his first public speech. It was very eloquent and powerful, and carried away the meeting, but it was elaborate, and had been committed to memory. On our way back, as I congratulated him, he said that such efforts cost him too dear, and asked me how I spoke so easily. I said that in his case, as in most, I thought it would be best not to burden the memory too much, but, having carefully prepared and committed any portion when special effect was desired, merely to put down other things in the desired order, leaving the wording of them to the moment."

The young man remembered this lesson, and acted upon it. He no longer finds it best to learn any portions of his speeches by heart, but his addresses show a remarkable thoroughness of preparation, else they could not be so thickly sown as they are with pregnant facts, telling figures, and apt illustrations. His pudding is too full of plums to be the work of the moment. Such aptness of quotation as he displays is sometimes a little too happy to be spontaneous; as when, in alluding to the difference between men's professions out of office and their measures in office, he quoted Thomas Moore:--

"As bees on flowers alighting cease to hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb."

So also, in referring to the aristocratic composition of the English government, he quoted Mr. Lowell's "Biglow Papers":--

"It is something like fulfilling the prophecies
When the first families have all the best offices."

Again, when lamenting the obstacles put in the way of universal education by the rivalries of sect, he produced a great effect in the House of Commons by saying:--

"We are, after all, of one religion."

And then he quoted in illustration an impressive sentence from William Penn, to the effect that just and good souls were everywhere of one faith, and "when death has taken off the mask, they will know one another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them strangers."

No man has less need to quote the brilliant utterances of others than John Bright; for he possesses himself the power to speak in epigrams, and to make sentences which remain long in the memory. Once in his life he found himself in opposition to the workingmen of his district, and during the excitement of an election he was greeted with hoots and hisses. He made a remark on the platform which all public men making head against opposition would do well to remember:--

"Although there are here many of the operative classes who consider me to be their enemy, I would rather have their ill-will now, while defending their interests, than have their ill-will hereafter because I have betrayed them."

One of his homely similes uttered thirty years ago, to show the waste and folly of the Crimean War, has become a familiar saying in Great Britain.

"Some men," said he, "because they have got government contracts, fancy that trade is good, and that war is good for trade. Why, it is but endeavoring to keep a dog alive by feeding him with his own tail."

This homeliness of speech, when there is strong conviction and massive sense behind it, has a prodigious effect upon a large meeting. Once, during his warfare upon the Corn Laws, he exclaimed:--

"This is not a party question, for men of all parties are united upon it. It is a pantry question--a knife-and-fork question--a question between the working millions and the aristocracy."

So in addressing the work-people of his native town, who were on a strike for higher wages at a time when it was impossible for the employers to accede to their demands without ruin, he expressed an obvious truth very happily in saying:--

"Neither act of parliament nor act of a multitude can keep up wages."

I need scarcely say that no combination of physical and intellectual powers can make a truly great orator. Moral qualities are indispensable. There must be courage, sincerity, patriotism, humanity, faith in the future of our race.

His Quaker training was evidently the most influential fact of his whole existence, for it gave him the key to the moral and political problems of his day. It made him, as it were, the natural enemy of privilege and monopoly in all their countless forms. It suffused his whole being with the sentiment of human equality, and showed him that no class can be degraded without lowering all other classes. He seems from the first to have known that human brotherhood is not a mere sentiment, not a conviction of the mind, but a fact of nature, from which there is no escape; so that no individual can be harmed without harm being done to the whole. When he was a young man he summed up all this class of truths in a sentence:--

"The interests of all classes are so intimately blended that none can suffer without injury being inflicted upon the rest, and the true interest of each will be found to be advanced by those measures which conduce to the prosperity of the whole."

Feeling thus, he was one of the first to join the movement for Free Trade. When he came upon the public stage the Corn Laws, as they were called, which sought to protect the interests of farmers and landlords by putting high duties upon imported food, had consigned to the poor-houses of Great Britain and Ireland more than two millions of paupers, and reduced two millions more to the verge of despair. John Bright was the great orator of the movement for the repeal of those laws. After six years of the best sustained agitation ever witnessed in a free country, the farmers and land-owners were not yet convinced. In 1846, however, an event occurred which gave the reasoning of Cobden and the eloquence of Bright their due effect upon the minds of the ruling class. This event was the Irish famine of 1846, which lessened the population of Ireland by two millions in one year. This awful event prevailed, though it would not have prevailed unless the exertions of Cobden and Bright had familiarized the minds of men with the true remedy,--which was the free admission of those commodities for the want of which people were dying.

On his seventieth birthday Mr. Bright justified what he called the policy of 1846. He said to his townsmen:--

"I was looking the other day at one of our wages books of 1840 and 1841. I find that the throttle-piecers were then receiving eight shillings a week, and they were working twelve hours a day. I find that now the same class of hands are receiving thirteen shillings a week at ten hours a day--exactly double. At that time we had a blacksmith, whom I used to like to see strike the sparks out. His wages were twenty-two shillings a week. Our blacksmiths now have wages of thirty-four shillings, and they only work ten hours."

Poor men alone know what these figures mean. They know what an amount of improvement in the lot of the industrial class is due to the shortened day, the cheaper loaf, the added shillings.

In a word, the effort of John Bright's life has been to apply Quaker principles to the government of his country. He has called upon ministers to cease meddling with the affairs of people on the other side of the globe, to let Turkey alone, to stop building insensate ironclads, and to devote their main strength to the improvement and elevation of their own people. He says to them in substance: You may have an historical monarchy and a splendid throne; you may have an ancient nobility, living in spacious mansions on vast estates; you may have a church hiding with its pomp and magnificence a religion of humility; and yet, with all this, if the mass of the people are ignorant and degraded, the whole fabric is rotten, and is doomed at last to sink into ruin.

THOMAS EDWARD,

COBBLER AND NATURALIST.

The strangest story told for a long time is that of Thomas Edward, shoemaker and naturalist, to whom the Queen of England recently gave a pension of fifty pounds a year. He was not a shoemaker who kept a shop and gave out work to others, but actually worked at the bench from childhood to old age, supporting a very large family on the eight or nine or ten shillings a week that he earned. And yet we find him a member of several societies of naturalists, the Linnæan Society among others, and an honored pensioner of the Queen.

His father was a Scottish linen weaver, and for some time a private soldier in a militia regiment which was called into active service during the wars with Napoleon; and it was while the regiment was stationed at an English sea-port that this remarkable child was born. A few months after, when the Waterloo victory had given peace to Europe, the regiment was ordered home and disbanded, and this family settled at Aberdeen, where the father resumed his former occupation. Now the peculiar character of Thomas Edward began to exhibit itself. He showed an extraordinary fondness for animals, to the sore distress and torment of his parents and their neighbors.

It was a taste purely natural, for not only was it not encouraged, it was strongly discouraged by every one who could be supposed to have influence over the boy. He disappeared one day when he was scarcely able to walk, and when he had been gone for some hours he was found in a pig-sty fast asleep, near a particularly savage sow and her pigs. As soon as he could walk well enough his delight was to ramble along the shore and into the country, gathering tadpoles, beetles, frogs, crabs, mice, rats, and spiders, to the horror of his mother, to say nothing of the neighbors, for these awful creatures escaped into houses near by and appeared to the inmates at the most unexpected moments.

His parents scolded and whipped him, but his love of animal life was unconquerable, and the only effect of opposing it was to make him more cunning in its gratification. They tied the little fellow by his leg to a table, but he drew the table up near the fire, burnt the rope in halves, and was off for the fields. They hid his coat, but he took his elder brother's coat and ran. Then they hid all his clothes, but he slipped on an old petticoat and had another glorious day out of doors, returning with a fever in his veins which brought him to death's door.

All these things, and many others like them, happened when he was still a boy under five years of age. Recovering from his fever he resumed his old tricks, and brought home one day, wrapped in his shirt, a wasp's nest, which his father took from him and plunged into hot water. Between four and five he was sent to school, his parents thinking to keep him out of mischief of this kind. But he had not the least interest in school knowledge, and constantly played truant; and when he did come to school he brought with him all kinds of horrid insects, reptiles, and birds. One morning during prayers a jackdaw began to caw, and as the bird was traced to the ownership of Thomas Edward, he was dismissed from the school in great disgrace. His perplexed parents sent him to another school, the teacher of which used more vigorous measures to cure him of his propensity, applying to his back an instrument of torture called "the taws." It was in vain. From this second school he was expelled, because some horse-leeches, which he had brought to school in a bottle, escaped, crept up the legs of the other boys, and drew blood from them.

"I would not take him back for twenty pounds!" said the schoolmaster in horror.

A third time his father put him at school; and now he experienced the ill consequences of having a bad name. A centipede was found upon another boy's desk, and he was of course suspected of having brought it into the school-room. But it so happened that on this one occasion he was innocent; it was another boy's centipede; and Thomas denied the charge. The schoolmaster whipped him severely for the supposed falsehood, and sent him away saying:--

"Go home, and tell your father to get you on board a man-of-war, as that is the best school for irreclaimables such as you."

He went home and declared he would go to no more schools, but would rather work. He had now reached the mature age of six years, and had been turned out of school three times, without having learned to write his own name. Soon after, he went to work in a tobacco factory on the river Don, a short distance out of Aberdeen, and there for two happy years he was free to employ all his leisure time in investigating animated nature around him. His love of natural history grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength, so that by the time he had completed his eighth year he was familiarly acquainted with the animals of that region, and had the most lively admiration for the more interesting specimens. He watched with delight the kingfisher, and loved to distinguish the voices of the different birds.

But his parents objecting to the tobacconist's trade, he was apprenticed about his ninth year to a shoemaker,--a violent, disreputable character, who made ruthless war upon the lad's birds and reptiles, searching his pockets for them, and killing them whenever found. The lad bore this misery for three years, and then his patience being exhausted, and having in his pocket the sum of seven pence, he ran away and walked a hundred miles into the country to the house of one of his uncles. His uncle received him kindly, entertained him a day or two, and gave him eighteen pence, upon which the boy returned home, and made a bargain with his master by which he received small wages and had complete control of his leisure time. At eighteen we may regard him as fairly launched upon life, a journeyman shoemaker, able to earn in good times nine shillings a week by laboring from six in the morning till nine at night. At that time all mechanics worked more hours than they do at present, and particularly shoemakers, whose sedentary occupation does not expend vitality so rapidly as out-of-door trades. And what made his case the more difficult was, he was a thorough-going Scotchman, and consequently a strict observer of Sunday. Confined though he was to his work fifteen hours a day, he abstained on principle from pursuing his natural studies on the only day he could call his own.

He was a night-bird, this Thomas Edward; and as in Scotland the twilight lasts till ten in the evening and the day dawns at three in the morning, there were some hours out of the twenty-four which he could employ, and did employ, in his rambles. At twenty-three he fell in love with a pretty girl, and married her, his income being still but nine and sixpence a week. His married life was a happy one, for his wife had the good sense to make no opposition to his darling pursuits, and let him fill their cottage and garden with as many creatures as he chose, not even scolding him for his very frequent absences during the night. Some one asked her recently about this, and her reply was:--

"Weel, he took such an interest in beasts that I didna compleen. Shoemakers were then a very drucken set, but his beasts keepit him frae them. My mon's been a sober mon all his life, and he never negleckit his wark. Sae I let him be."--

Children were born to them, eleven in all, and yet he found time to learn to write, to read some books, and to increase constantly his knowledge of nature. In order to procure specimens for his collection, he bought an old shot-gun for a sum equal to about a dollar,--such a battered old piece that he had to tie the barrel to the stock with a piece of string. A cow's horn served for his powder; he measured his charge with a tobacco pipe, and carried his shot in a paper-bag. About nine in the evening, carrying his supper with him, he would start out and search the country round for animals and rare plants as long as he could see; then eat his supper and lie down and sleep till the light returned, when he would continue his hunting till it was time for work. Many a fight he had in the darkness with badgers and pole-cats.

When he had thus been employed eight or nine years, his collection contained two thousand specimens of animals and two thousand plants, all nicely arranged in three hundred cases made with his own hands. Upon this collection he had founded hopes of getting money upon which to pursue his studies more extensively. So he took it to Aberdeen, six cart loads in all, accompanied by the whole family,--wife and five children. It needs scarcely to be said that his collection did not succeed, and he was obliged to sell the fruit of nine years' labor for twenty pounds. Nothing daunted, he returned to his cobbler's stall, and began again to collect, occasionally encouraged by a neighboring naturalist, and sometimes getting a little money for a rare specimen. Often he tried to procure employment as a naturalist, but unsuccessfully, and as late as 1875 we find him writing thus:--

"As a last and only remaining resource, I betook myself to my old and time-honored friend, a friend of fifty years' standing, who has never yet forsaken me nor refused help to my body when weary, nor rest to my limbs when tired--my well-worn cobbler's stool. And although I am now like a beast tethered to his pasture, with a portion of my faculties somewhat impaired, I can still appreciate and admire as much as ever the beauties and wonders of nature as exhibited in the incomparable works of our adorable Creator."

These are cheerful words to come from an old man who has enriched the science of his country by additions to its sources of knowledge. In another letter, written a year or two since, he says:--

"Had the object of my life been money instead of nature, I have no hesitation in saying that by this time I would have been a rich man. But it is not the things I have done that vex me so much as the things I have not done. I feel that I could have accomplished so much more. I had the will, but I wanted the means."

It is in this way that such men feel toward the close of their lives. Thomas Edward still lives, in his sixty-seventh year, at Banff, in Scotland, rich in his pension of fifty pounds a year, which is more than twice as much as the income he had when he supported by his labor a wife and eleven children. Even his specimens now command a price, and he is every way a prosperous gentleman. It seems a pity that such men cannot have their precious little fifty pounds to begin with, instead of to end with. But who could pick them out? What mortal eye can discern in a man the _genuine_ celestial fire before he has proved its existence by the devotion of a lifetime to his object? And even if it could be discerned in a young man, the fifty pounds a year might quench it.

ROBERT DICK,

BAKER AND NATURALIST.

The most northern county of Scotland is Caithness, a wild region of mountain, marsh, and rock-ribbed headlands, in which the storms of the Atlantic have worn every variety of fantastic indentation. Much of the land has been reclaimed in modern days by rich proprietors. There are manufactures of linen, wool, rope, and straw, besides important fisheries; so that forty thousand people now find habitation and subsistence in the county. There are castles, too, ancient and modern,--some in ruins, some of yesterday,--the summer home of wealthy people from the south.

The coast is among the most picturesque in the world, bearing a strong resemblance to the coast of Maine. The reader, perhaps, has never seen the coast of Maine. Then let him do so speedily, and he will know, as he sails along its bold headlands, and its seamed walls of rock rising here and there into mountains, how the coast of Caithness looked to one of the noblest men that ever lived in it, Robert Dick, baker of Thurso. Thurso is the most northern town of this most northern county. It is situated on Thurso Bay, which affords a good harbor, and it has thus grown to be a place of three or four thousand inhabitants. From this town the Orkney Islands can be seen, and a good walker can reach in a day's tramp Dunnet Head, the lofty promontory which ends the Island.

Here lived, labored, studied, and died, Robert Dick, a man whose name should never be pronounced by intelligent men but with respect.

He did not look like a hero. When the boys of the town saw him coming out of his baker's shop, in a tall stove-pipe hat, an old-fashioned dress coat and jean trousers, they used to follow him to the shore, and watch him as he walked along it with his eyes fixed upon the ground. Suddenly he would stop, fall upon his hands and knees, crawl slowly onward, and then with one hand catch something on the sand; an insect, perhaps. He would stick it upon a pin, put it in his hat, and go on his way; and the boys would whisper to one another that there was a mad baker in Thurso. Once he picked up a nut upon the beach, and said to his companion:--

"That has been brought by the ocean current and the prevailing winds all the way from one of the West India Islands."

He made the most astonishing journeys about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one of his letters we read:--

"Shouldering an old poker, a four-pound hammer, and with two chisels in my pocket, I set out.... What hammering! what sweating! Coat off; got my hands cut to bleeding."

In another letter he speaks of having "three pounds of iron chisels in his trousers pocket, a four-pound hammer in one hand and a fourteen-pound sledge-hammer in the other, and his old beaver hat filled with paper and twine."

But who and what was this man, and why was he performing these laborious journeys? Robert Dick, born in 1811, was the son of an excise officer, who gave his children a hard stepmother when Robert was ten years old. The boy's own mother, all tenderness and affection, had spoiled him for such a life as he now had to lead under a woman who loved him not, and did not understand his unusual cast of character, his love of nature, his wanderings by the sea, his coming home with his pockets full of wet shells and his trousers damaged by the mire. She snubbed him; she whipped him. He bore her ill treatment with wonderful patience; but it impaired the social side of him forever. Nearly fifty years after he said to one of his few friends:--

"All my naturally buoyant, youthful spirits were broken. To this day I feel the effects. I cannot shake them off. It is this that still makes me shrink from the world."

At thirteen he escaped from a home blighted by this woman, and went apprentice to a baker; and when he was out of his time served as a journeyman for three years; then set up a small business for himself in Thurso. It was a very small business indeed; for at that day bread was a luxury which many people of Caithness only allowed themselves on Sundays; their usual fare being oatmeal. He was a baker all the days of his life, and his business never increased so as to oblige him to employ even a baker's boy. He made his bread, his biscuit, and his gingerbread without any assistance, and when it was done, it was sold in his little shop by an old housekeeper, who lived with him till he died.