Arkwright’s name was now of world-wide fame. Hundreds and thousands of people, many of whom had come to see his first cotton-mill, crowded the rocks and roads about Cromford, and mingled with the long procession that bore the body of the great inventor to his last resting-place.
They erected a monument in the church of Cromford to his memory. But the name of Arkwright needs no carved memorial of stone. His memorial is of a more lasting kind, for it is he whom England has to thank to-day for an industry that has enriched the land. Not “proud Preston” alone—a small town at his birth, a mighty place of manufacture now—has Arkwright made to grow and flourish.
He was a man of “Napoleon nerve.” Where other men saw but a short way ahead, he grasped the end from the beginning; where other minds saw merely a part, his eye was able to take in the whole. He may have gathered up some threads from other men’s brains, but it was he who wove them into one great whole. He had a business faculty—he had shown it as a boy—that rose almost to the height of genius. And he believed in himself. He had great notions, great ambitions. Nothing was too big a project for him to attempt. And success was his—great success, as the world counts it. Immense riches, too, were his, for when he died he left behind him half a million. But to us that seems not of so much account as that that great mind of his was the first to grasp what was to put within their reach a source of riches and profit to thousands of working-people in England, and this in face of bitter opposition from the people themselves. He braved their jealousy, he held his own against their prejudices and attacks, and working often in bodily weakness and pain, but with persevering determination, he brought this boon to his country. With untiring courage and long, patient labour, he built up the splendid scheme that has turned out for us to be the Factory System of our country to-day.
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.
When Josiah Wedgwood was born, some 170 years ago, I daresay the people of the little village of Burslem would have been greatly astonished had they been told that the humble potter’s child was by-and-by to change the place, with its few straggling houses, into a flourishing town with thousands of inhabitants. And not this alone, but that he would make for himself such fame that his name should be a household word throughout Great Britain, and indeed throughout the world.
When Josiah came into the world there was already a small army of brothers and sisters awaiting him in the humble little house close by the churchyard of Burslem, for he was the youngest of thirteen.
Although then large towns and places near the sea were marching on with the progress of civilisation, little country places buried inland were shunted into a siding, as it were, and so were left far behind the great world. In this way the midland counties of England were a long time emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. Staffordshire, the county of pottery, lagged a long way behind in improvements. Its villages were straggling and dirty. Its houses little better than thatched hovels or mud huts. Heaps of waste and dirt and rubbish blocked their doorways. Broken ware was scattered everywhere. Hollows in the ground, where clay had been scooped out to make ware, gaped close to the doorways, and collected great pools of evil-smelling stagnant water.