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.
[Illustration:
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.