“I am becoming an old man,” he wrote. “Age and infirmity overtake me, and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than increase the objects of my attention.”
The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left the better for his passage through it.
He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble potter’s cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name. He was a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything attempts the first beginning.
But while we admire his splendid qualities, it is the singular beauty of his nature—a nature doubtless softened and sweetened by trial—his uncomplaining bravery, his thought for others, his simple, steadfast determination to carry through his life-work, in spite of the burden of weariness and sickness and bodily pain, that most of all speak to our hearts.
GEORGE STEPHENSON.
If a town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind horses. But now times are changed, and it is not wonderful that the name of George Stephenson, the man who has opened up the country and spread lines upon it like a mighty network, is a name to-day that people look up to as one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known.
Most of us are fond of seeing the small beginnings of great endings, so it is natural enough that for us the tiny village of Wylam should be of deepest interest, for here George Stephenson first saw the light.