The duke was born in 1736. He was a weak and sickly child, his mental capacity being apparently defective to a degree sufficient to debar him from his inheritance of the family title and estates. An affair of the heart which resulted unfavorably rendered him morose, and changed his whole course of life. He abruptly quitted the race-track, where he had condescended even to play the rôle of “jockey,” and turned his attention to the improvement of his estates. They contained coal deposits, which he undertook to develop through cheapening transportation, and Brindley became his engineer. His first canal, consisting largely of aqueducts, was called “Brindley’s castle in the air,” and his “river hung in the air.” It was this “river hung in the air”—the first English canal—that made the Manchester of to-day possible. Another canal enterprise of the duke cost more than a million dollars—that connecting Liverpool with Manchester. This latter canal yielded £80,000 per annum income, and it was constructed by Brindley at a salary of 3s. 6d. a day!
Brindley was obstinate, and often quarrelled with his employer about the methods of construction of great works; and what is more, the duke always yielded. He humbly submitted to every demand made by his engineer except a demand for compensation. Brindley’s “wage” rate during the many years occupied in the duke’s great canal enterprises was 3s. 6d. per day. This, at all events, is the price named by Smiles in his life of Brindley. In a note to the work it is, however, stated that his stipulated pay was a guinea a day. It is agreed on all hands, however, that whatever the rate agreed upon was, Brindley was not paid, and that his heirs were begging unsuccessfully for his just dues long after his death. In a word, Brindley’s honor as an engineer being at stake, and it being dearer to him than any money consideration, he worked for nothing rather than allow the enterprise to fail. And the duke was parsimonious enough to take the engineer’s services for nothing, and his heirs were mean enough to refuse payment for such services when demanded by his widow.
In a literary point of view Brindley was ignorant, but in no other respect. This was said of him by one of his contemporaries:
“Mr. Brindley is one of those great geniuses whom Nature sometimes rears by her own force, and brings to maturity without the necessity of cultivation. His whole plan is admirable, and so well calculated that he is never at a loss; for if any difficulty arises he removes it with a facility which appears so much like inspiration that you would think Minerva was at his fingers’ ends.”[33]
[33] “Lives of the Engineers.” By Samuel Smiles. London: John Murray, 1862. Vol. I., “Life of James Brindley.”
The life of Brindley is typical of a score of biographies presented in the “Lives of the Engineers,” among which the following are especially worthy of mention: William Edwards, John Metcalf, John Perry, Sir Hugh Myddelton, Cornelius Vermuyden, Andrew Yarranton,[34] Andrew Meikle, John Rennie, John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, William Murdock, Dr. D. Papin, Thomas Savery, Dud Dudley, Matthew Boulton, and William Symington. These, and their natural coadjutors, the discoverers of new forces in nature and the inventors of new things in art, the iron-workers and tool-makers—these are the great names in English history. They are the names without which there would have been no English history worth writing. Mr. Gladstone once said of them, naming Brindley, Metcalf, Smeaton, Rennie, and Telford, “These men who have now become famous among us had no mechanics’ institutes, no libraries, no classes, no examinations to cheer them on their way. In the greatest poverty, difficulties, and discouragements their energies were found sufficient for their work, and they have written their names in a distinguished page of the history of their country.”
[34] “He was the founder of English political economy, the first man in England who saw and said that peace is better than war, that trade is better than plunder, that honest industry is better than martial greatness, and that the best occupation of a government is to secure prosperity at home, and let other nations alone.”—“Elements of Political Science.” By Patrick Edward Dove. Edinburgh: 1854.
The admission of Mr. Gladstone that the great achievements of these heroes of invention and discovery were won without any aid whatever, either from the government or the people of England, is a pregnant fact. It is the key-note of this work, the reason why it is written and published.
The neglect of the useful arts by all the governments of the world, from the dawn of civilization down to the present time, is an impeachment of the common-sense of mankind as shown in the conduct of public affairs. The civilized man might have learned wisdom from the savage, who is taught to fight, to hunt, and to fish, the brain, the hand, and the eye being trained simultaneously. But he chose to learn of Plato, who in the “Republic” says to Glaucon, “All the useful arts, I believe, we thought degrading.” And further in the same work: “We shall tell our people, in mythical language, you are doubtless all brethren as many as inhabit the city, but the God who created you, mixed gold in the composition of such of you as are qualified to rule, which gives them the highest value, while in the auxiliaries he made silver an ingredient, assigning iron and copper to the cultivators of the soil and the other workmen. Therefore, inasmuch as you are all related to one another, although your children will generally resemble their parents, yet sometimes a golden parent will produce a silver child, and a silver parent a golden child, and so on, each producing any. The rulers, therefore, have received this in charge first and above all from the gods, to observe nothing more closely, in their character of vigilant guardians, than the children that are born, to see which of these metals enters into the composition of their souls; and if a child be born in their class with an alloy of copper or iron, they are to have no manner of pity upon it, but giving it the value that belongs to its nature, they are to thrust it away into the class of artisans or agriculturists. And if, again, among these a child be born with an admixture of gold or silver, when they have assayed it they are to raise it either to the class of guardians or to that of auxiliaries, because there is an oracle which declares that the city shall then perish when it is guarded by iron or copper.”[35]
[35] “The Republic of Plato,” p. 114. London: Macmillan & Co., 1881.