his "Case," that it did not begin to pay till it had been persevered in for five years, and had swallowed up a capital of more than twelve thousand pounds. We cannot doubt that it required all Arkwright's dexterity and firmness to induce his partners to persevere with the experiment under this large expenditure and protracted disappointment. But it was the character of the man to devote his whole heart and faculties to whatever he engaged in. Even to the close of his life the management of his different factories was his only occupation, and even amusement. Although he had been from early life afflicted with severe asthma, he took scarcely any recreation-employing all his time either in superintending the daily concerns of these establishments—which were regulated upon a plan that itself indicated in its contriver no little ingenuity and reach of mind;* or in adding such improvements to his machinery from time to time, as his experience and observation suggested. And thus it was, that from a poor barber he raised himself to what he eventually became not merely to rank and great affluence-but to be the founder of a new branch of national industry, destined in a wonderfully short space of time to assume the very first place among the manufactures of his country." Here, we regret to state, our guide deserts us. Having accomplished his purpose, and displayed the claims of Arkwright to the merit of an inventor, he forbears to depict him in the character of a wealthy man, increasing in honours as in years. But, in fact, the increase of the cotton trade was the increase of Arkwright's prosperity; he saw and heard the sources of his riches on every side of his growing mansion, and having once tasted the pleasure of growing wealthy, adhered to it with commendable constancy. By pursuing his fortune, he acquired the praise which many purchase by the sacrifice of fortune, time, and ease that of a public benefactor, and a friend to the poor. It has been said, that his frugality bordered on parsimony; but we should not hastily conclude that he was discreditably penurious, or would have begrudged to spend when human kindness or Christian duty bade him loose his purse strings. Seeing him possessed of the revenues of a prince, the world expected him at least to adopt the style of a gentle 66 "The originality and comprehension of Sir Richard Arkwright's mind," says the writer of the article on the cotton manufacture, in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica,' were perhaps marked by nothing more strongly than the judg ment with which, although new to business, he conducted the great concerns his discoveries gave rise to, and the systematic order and arrangement which he introduced into every department of his extensive works. His plans of management, which must have been entirely his own, since no establishment of a similar nature then existed, were universally adopted by others; and after long experience they have not yet in any material point been altered or improved." man; but the world is an unreasonable personage, and by no means so charitable in its judgments of the rich, as devout in its adoration of riches. For a man accustomed from infancy till middle age to a homely method of living, to adopt the sumptuous elegancies of artificial society, is to make himself thoroughly miserable. The expense is the least part of the annoyance. His bed, his meals, his garments, every piece of furniture in his mansion torments him, his servants agonize him, but his wife and daughters are worse than all. To say nothing of elegances or luxuries, the most essential comforts of genteel existence are nuisances to those who have grown up without them, e. g. frequent changes of linen, daily shaving, &c. Arkwright had no pretensions to the philosophic mind of Watt, or the tasteful genius and magnificent soul of Wedgwood; he did not value his discovery for the scientific power it displayed, nor did he make it subservient to the revival of the forms of antique beauty. He saw its utility, and that was enough. In politics he does not seem to have taken an active part, at least he never aspired to a seat in parliament, which he might easily have commanded; but perhaps he thought it throwing money away. Yet on occasion of presenting an address, in the year 1786, he was knighted by the hand of George the Third. This is an expensive honour, which has been made rather too common; but it had the effect of giving the barber's wife precedence over all the untitled ladies in the county. Sir Richard Arkwright died at his seat at Cromford, Derbyshire, August 3d, 1792. He left the bulk of his fortune between his son and daughter, his only surviving issue, but settled £500 a year on his widow, and remembered all his nieces and nephews in his will. He was buried at Matlock, but gave directions that his body should be removed to the chapel he had himself begun to build at Cromford as soon as it should be finished; and appointed, in his last testament, that his son should complete the structure, and settle £50 a year on the chaplain. This bequest proves that prosperity had not produced the same ungodly changes on Arkwright as on Pope's Sir Balaam. It could not be said of him, What once he called a blessing now was wit, And God's good providence a lucky hit. But why was not the fifty pounds made three hundred? " The times are past when a country parson could be " passing rich with forty pounds a year," if indeed they ever existed, save when "every rood of ground maintained its man: or to refer to a period somewhat nearer to historic existence, since forty pounds were equivalent to three hundred. Under the present aristocratic constitution of the church, three hundred a year is requisite to keep a married clergyman on a level with his brethren. These are not the days of "wonderful Robert Walker." A clergyman could not now marry a domestic without losing caste, nor could he employ his daughters in spinning, or his sons in the labours of the field, without staining his cloth in the public estimation. This, we apprehend, is no new state of things. The few clergymen who have eked out a small income by the labour of their families, and yet commanded the respect of their parishioners, have lived out of the world's eye, in remote mountain dales, where simple manners and christian equality having once grown, have long continued, like morning dew at noon in the centre of a forest. But clergymen, living in general society, were always obligated to be gentlemen, and though the expense of gentility has varied at different times, yet it has generally been so much as to be inconvenient to a poor parson with a large family (and poor parsons have generally large families), and less than three hundred a year. Less than this no beneficed clergyman ought to have, as long as any have more than five. Wherever exorbitant wealth exists, whether in a church, a profession, a regiment, or a nation, there will be keenly-felt and discontented poverty, which will assume its most fearful form of lawless and infuriate want, if the customary circulation of wealth be impeded, or the number of the poor exceed the demands of the rich. And here the question occurs, is Arkwright, and other such as he, who, by multiplying the powers of production, have so greatly increased the public and private wealth of Britain, to be considered as benefactors or not? Or, to state the question more strongly and more truly, was it in wrath or in mercy that mankind were led to the modern improvements in machinery? Should we merely take a survey of the present state of the country, especially as regards the labouring classes, we should be apt to denominate these inventions the self-inflicted scourge of avarice. They have indeed increased wealth, but they have tremendously increased poverty; not that willing poverty which weans the soul from earth, and fixes the desires on high; not that poverty which was heretofore to be found in mountain villages, in solitary dwellings mid-way up the bleak fell side, where one green speck, one garden plot, a hive of bees, and a few sheep would keep a family content; not that poverty which is the nurse of temperance and thoughtful piety;--but squalid, ever-murmuring poverty, cooped in mephitic dens and sunless alleys; hopeless, purposeless, wasteful in the midst of want; a poverty which dwarfs and disfeatures body and soul, makes the capacities aud even the acquirements of intellect useless and pernicious, and multiplies a race of men without the virtues which beasts oft-times display,-without fidelity, gratitude, or natural affection. The moral degradation of this caste may not be greater in England than elsewhere, but their physical sufferings are more constant than in the southern climates, and their tendency to increase much stronger than in the northern latitudes. But has machinery occasioned the existence or growth of this class? Certainly not,-for it has always existed since society assumed its present shape, and is to be found in countries like Spain and Naples, where pride and indolence are too powerful even for the desire of wealth to overcome. But the artificial wealth which manufactures have assisted to generate, has generated or aggregated a factitious population, dependent for employment and subsistence on a state of things exceedingly and incalculably precarious, and seldom able to practice more than one department of a trade, in which labour is minutely divided; a population naturally improvident in prosperity and impatient in distress, whom the first interruption of trade converts to paupers, and whom a continuance of bad times is sure to fix in that permanent pauperism, from which there is no redemption. Times may mend, but man, once prostrate, never recovers his upright posture. Once a vagabond and always a vagabond. Once accustomed to eat the bread of idleness, the operative seldom takes pains to procure employment, and having been paid something for doing nothing, thinks ever after that he is paid too little for toil, and seizes every pretext to throw up his work again. Character has little influence on a man whom the world considers, and teaches to consider himself but as a portion of a mass. To be sensible of character Man must feel himself a responsible individual, and to individualize the human being, not only must the reflective powers be evoked and disciplined by education, but there must be property, or profession, or political privilege, or something equivalent, a certain sphere of freeagency, to make the man revere himself as man," and respect the opinions of his fellow men. Now it is the tendency of wealth to increase the number of those who have no property but the strength or skill which they must sell to the highest bidder: who either by labour, or without labour, must live upon the property of others, and who, having no permanent mooring, are liable by every wind of circumstance, to slip their cables, and drift away with the idle sea-weed and the rotting wrecks of long-past tempests. Thus, to vary the metaphor, the sediment of the commonwealth is augmented with continual fresh depositions, till the stream of society is nigh choaked up, and our gallant vessels stranded on the flats and shallows,-without metaphor, so many of the people drop into the mob, that the mob is like to be too many for the people, and wealth itself to be swallowed up by the poverty itself has begotten. 66 But these evils do not rise directly from the machinery which expedites labour, but from the blind desire of accumulation, the passion for sudden wealth, which that machinery has helped to pamper, and which first the ambition and then the necessities of the state have fostered and flattered. The right use of machinery is to enable men to produce what is necessary and comfortable for the body, at the least possible expense of time, labour, care, thought, and capital, and so far to free every man of every nation from the worky-day business of the world, that the poorest, while he looks forward with assurance to his morrow's meal, may have some leisure for rational enjoyment, mental cultivation, meditation, and devotion; that, whatever ranks, orders, honours, or dignities may subsist, and however the political functions of the commonweal may be distributed, there may be none who toil merely to eat, and eat to toil. Then, and not till then, will Freedom be more than a name. The Earth has lent Her waters, Air her breezes; and the sail Here a large town, continuous and compact, Hiding the face of earth for leagues-and there, The abodes of men irregularly massed Like trees in forests-spread through spacious tracts, Freighted from every climate of the world With the world's choicest produce. Hence that sum Or ride at anchor in her sounds and bays; That animating spectacle of sails Which through her inland regions, to and fro Hence a dread arm of floating Power, a voice |