A fly-shuttle worked by a spring, and devised by James Kay, a loom-maker of Colchester, formed the first in a series of mighty inventions, all met on their first appearance with a whirlwind of rage among those who lived by the labour of the hand. Kay was bullied by weavers, cheated by masters who wanted to use his ideas without paying for them, and ground in the slow torture of expensive lawsuits. Glad at last to leave his ungrateful country, he found a wretched grave in Paris.

James Hargreaves, a weaver of Standhill near Blackburn, was sitting idle for want of cotton weft one day, when his wife Jenny's spinning-wheel capsized, and the wheel, lying on its side, continued to revolve. A bright idea struck him, resulting in a spinning-frame with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel. The spinning-jenny, as he named it after his wife, raised a tumult in the place. A crowd of spinners smashed the machine and drove the inventor to Nottingham. In vain he struggled there; rich men combined to crush the penniless genius, and soon his death gratified their malicious. wish. So perished the leaders of the forlorn hope in this unequal strife.

The names of Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, and Edmund Cartwright mark the victories by which the present magnificence of the cotton manufacture was achieved. Few lives present nobler lessons of endurance and upward striving than that of Richard Arkwright. The want of cotton weftthat is, yarn to be woven into cloth-pressed heavily on all the weavers of the country side, who were often obliged to spend precious time gathering weft from house to house. Arkwright thought of this, and shaped out a plan which a working clockmaker called Kay enabled him to put into the form of a model. His angry wife broke the models that pinched their meals. She then left him; his clothes went to rags, his money melted into a few halfpence, before the proud day came when the

1768

completed model of the spinning-machine stood before him. Shaking off the dust of Preston, his native town, he travelled to Nottingham, where he secured a partnership in the firm of Need and Strutt, stocking-weavers. The taking of a patent in 1769 plunged him into a sea of lawsuits, for his right of patenting was contested. The perfect form of his invention, which is called the water-frame, may be assigned to the year 1771, when the firm to which he belonged built a spinning mill, worked by water, at Cromford in Derbyshire. For five years little or no profit resulted from the working of the water-frame; but then the tide turned in spite of renewed attacks and multitudinous lawsuits, and wealth began to flow in upon Arkwright. He was knighted in 1786, became High Sheriff of Derbyshire, and died at Cromford in 1792, aged sixty. His fortune of more than half a million was trebled by his son.

1779

We turn now to a man who was less successful, if we measure success by money-making. A struggling widow, named Crompton, living in a farm-house at Bolton, had a son Samuel, whom she kept tightly to the loom. Sam, who loved fiddle-playing, was vexed by the breaking threads which often kept him from his music. The idea of doing something to expedite his work led him to stay up whole nights in his little room, working with wood and iron. He worked away until he had completed the mule, a machine improving on those of Hargreaves and Arkwright. Il luck pursued him to the last. The £5,000 which Crompton got from the government in course of time scarcely paid his debts. Dying in 1827, aged seventy-four, he added another to the long list of men who have suffered martyrdom in the cause of art.

A very different man from any of these now rises as the inventor of the power-loom. Edmund Cartwright, born in 1743, went from Wakefield School to Oxford, where he studied at University College and became a Fellow of Magdalene.

1784

The duties of his cure as a clergyman at Goadby-Marwood in Leicestershire and other places did not prevent him from cultivating his poetic talent and contributing to the Monthly Review. Nothing certainly was farther from his thoughts than that he should enrol his name in the list of great mechanical inventors. The talk at a dinner-party at Matlock, at which he was present, turned upon spinning-machines, which were then creating considerable wonder and disgust. It suggested to Cartwright that there was no reason why weaving as well as spinning should not be done by machinery. The result of his ponderings and plannings appeared six months later in a clumsy piece of carpentry and smith-work, which contained the germ of the power-loom. All old pursuits were then abandoned. Having established some mills at Doncaster, he endeavoured to give England the benefit of his invention. But all the spite and malevolence of the weaving fraternity-alike men and masters-arose against him. They burned his mill; they infringed his patent; they damaged his goods. The brave heart, the teeming brain never failed. He bore his narrowed circumstances without a murmur, and went on inventing until the day he died. A grant of £10,000, made by Parliament in 1808, saved him from want or the need of toil during the evening of his life, which closed in 1827.

Many inventors and improvers added to the works of these great men. Then steam began to roll the spindles and work the reeds at a surprising rate, which multiplied the produce of the mills beyond all anticipation, enabling the country to bear its gigantic burdens with the greatest ease. From being a wild moorland tract, Lancashire became full of industry and wealth, the parent cities presiding over a host of independent and very thriving towns of minor note.

CHAPTER XIII.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE.

The North Ministry-Freedom of the Press-Dismissal of Fox-The Tea Tax-Boston Harbour--Lexington-Bunker Hill-George Washington -Declaration of Independence-Saratoga-Valley Forge-Death of Chatham-Yorktown-Siege of Gibraltar-Peace.

THE

HE Grafton Ministry could not long survive Pitt's retirement. In 1770 the Duke of Grafton gave place to Frederick, Lord North, a shambling, thick-tongued nobleman, in face remarkably like the king. Fox took office as a junior Lord of the Admiralty, and Edward Thurlow became SolicitorGeneral. The cabinet contained almost the same men as had served under Grafton; but the change of head made it more distinctly Tory. It was under this ministry chiefly that the American war was carried on. One of its first acts was to remove all the duties on imports in America except the tax on tea. That was a useless and ill-considered concession, because it left the principle untouched.

A dispute of no small importance raged during the early part of 1771, between the House of Commons and the London printers, who had begun to publish the speeches and debates of the House. Many a literary man had earned his dinner by casting the substance of speeches into a popular form. The reputation of certain orators rests thus on uncertain ground, since even in the case of Chatham we can trace the evident

work of Samuel Johnson's pen. A Colonel Onslow, stung by

certain nicknames, called the attention of the House to the reporting of debates, which had been already (1728) declared a punishable offence. Burke, looking with a larger view, told the House that such things were natural and must go on. The sergeant-at-arms was nevertheless sent into the city to seize the printers. When one of them named Wheble was carried before Alderman Wilkes, he dismissed the charge. Alderman Oliver and the Lord Mayor followed this audacious example; but the wrath of the Commons was roused, and the two last were sent to the Tower with Wilkes. The government was afraid to meddle. Finally, the Commons beat an ignominious retreat, and the right of publishing the proceedings of Parliament has stood unquestioned ever since. Woodfall, the publisher of Junius, turned his surprising memory to good account in the Diary, by going to listen from the Strangers' Gallery, and then writing out all that he had heard.

Out of this disturbance grew a rupture between Fox and North. Owing to previous disagreement between the colleagues, Pitt had resigned his post at the Admiralty, but was again received into the ministry as one of the Lords of the Treasury. Stung, however, at the weak dealings of the Premier with the printers, Fox proposed that Woodfall should be sent to Newgate. ference, sent Fox a note of dismissal.

1774

North, resenting this interThe death of his father, still further to cut Fox

Lord Holland, in this year, served loose from the ministry.

Nearer and blacker grew the cloud which at last burst into the American war. While the entire horizon gloomed under its shadow, Edmund Burke, who had since 1771 been agent for the state of New York, uttered the thunders of his eloquence against the taxation of tea in the American colonies. A further indiscretion on the part of the government hastened the crisis. In 1773, by an arrangement with the East India Company, it allowed a large consignment of tea to be sent to