Captains of Industry

J >> James Parton >> Captains of Industry

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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 Linnaean 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.

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