Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

CHAPTER II—LEADERS OF INDUSTRY—INVENTORS AND PRODUCERS

“Le travail et la Science sont desormais les maitres du monde.”—De

Salvandy.

 

“Deduct all that men of the humbler classes have done for England

in the way of inventions only, and see where she would have been

but for them.”—Arthur Helps.

 

One of the most strongly-marked features of the English people is

their spirit of industry, standing out prominent and distinct in

their past history, and as strikingly characteristic of them now as

at any former period. It is this spirit, displayed by the commons

of England, which has laid the foundations and built up the

industrial greatness of the empire. This vigorous growth of the

nation has been mainly the result of the free energy of

individuals, and it has been contingent upon the number of hands

and minds from time to time actively employed within it, whether as

cultivators of the soil, producers of articles of utility,

contrivers of tools and machines, writers of books, or creators of

works of art. And while this spirit of active industry has been

the vital principle of the nation, it has also been its saving and

remedial one, counteracting from time to time the effects of errors

in our laws and imperfections in our constitution.

 

The career of industry which the nation has pursued, has also

proved its best education. As steady application to work is the

healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best

discipline of a state. Honourable industry travels the same road

with duty; and Providence has closely linked both with happiness.

The gods, says the poet, have placed labour and toil on the way

leading to the Elysian fields. Certain it is that no bread eaten

by man is so sweet as that earned by his own labour, whether bodily

or mental. By labour the earth has been subdued, and man redeemed

from barbarism; nor has a single step in civilization been made

without it. Labour is not only a necessity and a duty, but a

blessing: only the idler feels it to be a curse. The duty of work

is written on the thews and muscles of the limbs, the mechanism of

the hand, the nerves and lobes of the brain—the sum of whose

healthy action is satisfaction and enjoyment. In the school of

labour is taught the best practical wisdom; nor is a life of manual

employment, as we shall hereafter find, incompatible with high

mental culture.

 

Hugh Miller, than whom none knew better the strength and the

weakness belonging to the lot of labour, stated the result of his

experience to be, that Work, even the hardest, is full of pleasure

and materials for self-improvement. He held honest labour to be

the best of teachers, and that the school of toil is the noblest of

schools—save only the Christian one,—that it is a school in which

the ability of being useful is imparted, the spirit of independence

learnt, and the habit of persevering effort acquired. He was even

of opinion that the training of the mechanic,—by the exercise

which it gives to his observant faculties, from his daily dealing

with things actual and practical, and the close experience of life

which he acquires,—better fits him for picking his way along the

journey of life, and is more favourable to his growth as a Man,

emphatically speaking, than the training afforded by any other

condition.

 

The array of great names which we have already cursorily cited, of

men springing from the ranks of the industrial classes, who have

achieved distinction in various walks of life—in science,

commerce, literature, and art—shows that at all events the

difficulties interposed by poverty and labour are not

insurmountable. As respects the great contrivances and inventions

which have conferred so much power and wealth upon the nation, it

is unquestionable that for the greater part of them we have been

indebted to men of the humblest rank. Deduct what they have done

in this particular line of action, and it will be found that very

little indeed remains for other men to have accomplished.

 

Inventors have set in motion some of the greatest industries of the

world. To them society owes many of its chief necessaries,

comforts, and luxuries; and by their genius and labour daily life

has been rendered in all respects more easy as well as enjoyable.

Our food, our clothing, the furniture of our homes, the glass which

admits the light to our dwellings at the same time that it excludes

the cold, the gas which illuminates our streets, our means of

locomotion by land and by sea, the tools by which our various

articles of necessity and luxury are fabricated, have been the

result of the labour and ingenuity of many men and many minds.

Mankind at large are all the happier for such inventions, and are

every day reaping the benefit of them in an increase of individual

well-being as well as of public enjoyment.

 

Though the invention of the working steam-engine—the king of

machines—belongs, comparatively speaking, to our own epoch, the

idea of it was born many centuries ago. Like other contrivances

and discoveries, it was effected step by step—one man transmitting

the result of his labours, at the time apparently useless, to his

successors, who took it up and carried it forward another stage,—

the prosecution of the inquiry extending over many generations.

Thus the idea promulgated by Hero of Alexandria was never

altogether lost; but, like the grain of wheat hid in the hand of

the Egyptian mummy, it sprouted and again grew vigorously when

brought into the full light of modern science. The steam-engine

was nothing, however, until it emerged from the state of theory,

and was taken in hand by practical mechanics; and what a noble

story of patient, laborious investigation, of difficulties

encountered and overcome by heroic industry, does not that

marvellous machine tell of! It is indeed, in itself, a monument of

the power of self-help in man. Grouped around it we find Savary,

the military engineer; Newcomen, the Dartmouth blacksmith; Cawley,

the glazier; Potter, the engine-boy; Smeaton, the civil engineer;

and, towering above all, the laborious, patient, never-tiring James

Watt, the mathematical-instrument maker.

 

Watt was one of the most industrious of men; and the story of his

life proves, what all experience confirms, that it is not the man

of the greatest natural vigour and capacity who achieves the

highest results, but he who employs his powers with the greatest

industry and the most carefully disciplined skill—the skill that

comes by labour, application, and experience. Many men in his time

knew far more than Watt, but none laboured so assiduously as he did

to turn all that he did know to useful practical purposes. He was,

above all things, most persevering in the pursuit of facts. He

cultivated carefully that habit of active attention on which all

the higher working qualities of the mind mainly depend. Indeed,

Mr. Edgeworth entertained the opinion, that the difference of

intellect in men depends more upon the early cultivation of this

HABIT OF ATTENTION, than upon any great disparity between the

powers of one individual and another.

 

Even when a boy, Watt found science in his toys. The quadrants

lying about his father’s carpenter’s shop led him to the study of

optics and astronomy; his ill health induced him to pry into the

secrets of physiology; and his solitary walks through the country

attracted him to the study of botany and history. While carrying

on the business of a mathematical-instrument maker, he received an

order to build an organ; and, though without an ear for music, he

undertook the study of harmonics, and successfully constructed the

instrument. And, in like manner, when the little model of

Newcomen’s steam-engine, belonging to the University of Glasgow,

was