It granted patents to the manufacturer,but the patents were a source of perpetual worry and litigation.The Chancellor of the Exchequer might look with complacency upon the development of a new branch of trade;but it was because he was lying in wait to come down upon it with a new tax or system of duties.
The men who were the chief instruments of the pro.cess were 'self-made';they were the typical examples of Mr Smiles's virtue of self-help;they owed nothing to government or to the universities which passed for the organs of national culture.The leading engineers began as ordinary mechanics.John Metcalf (1717-1810),otherwise 'blind Jack of Knaresborough,'was a son of poor parents.He had lost his sight by smallpox at the age of six,and,in spite of his misfortune,became a daring rider,wrestler,soldier,and carrier,and made many roads in the north of England,executing surveys and constructing the works himself.James Brindley (1716-1772),son of a midland collier,barely able to read or write,working out plans by processes which he could not explain,and lying in bed till they took shape in his brain,a rough mechanic,labouring for trifling weekly wages,created the canals which mainly enabled Manchester and Liverpool to make an unprecedented leap in prosperity.
The two great engineers,Thomas Telford (1757-1834),famous for the Caledonian canal and the Menai bridge;and John Rennie (1761-1821),drainer of Lincolnshire fens,and builder of Waterloo bridge and the Plymouth breakwater,rose from the ranks.Telford inherited and displayed in a different direction the energies of Eskdale borderers,whose achievements in the days of cattle-stealing were to be made famous by Scott:Rennie was the son of an East Lothian farmer.
Both of them learned their trade by actual employment as mechanics.The inventors of machinery belonged mainly to the lower middle classes.Kay was a small manufacturer;Hargreaves a hand-loom weaver.Crompton the son of a small farmer;and Arkwright a country barber.Watt,son of a Greenock carpenter,came from the sturdy Scottish stock,ultimately of covenanting ancestry,from which so many eminent men have sprung.
The new social class,in which such men were the leaders,held corresponding principles.They owed whatever success they won to their own right hands.
They were sturdy workers,with eyes fixed upon success in life,and success generally of course measured by a money criterion.Many of them showed intellectual tastes,and took an honourable view of their social functions.Watt showed his ability in scientific inquiries outside of the purely industrial application;Josiah Wedgwood,in whose early days the Staffordshire potters had led a kind of gipsy life,settling down here and there to carry on their trade,had not only founded a great industry,but was a man of artistic taste,a patron of art,and a lover of science.Telford,the Eskdale shepherd,was a man of literary taste,and was especially friendly with the typical man of letters,Southey.Others,of course,were of a lower type.Arkwright combined the talents of an inventor with those of a man of business.He was a man,says Baines (the historian of the cotton trade),who was sure to come out of an enterprise with profit,whatever the result to his partners.He made a great fortune,and founded a county family.Others rose in the same direction.
The Peels,for example,represented a line of yeomen.One Peel founded a cotton business;his son became a baronet and an influential member of parliament;and his grandson went to Oxford,and became the great leader of the Conservative partY,although like Walpole,he owed his power to a kind of knowledge in which his adopted class were generally deficient.
The class which owed its growing importance to the achievements of such men was naturally imbued with their spirit.Its growth meant the development of a class which under the old order had been strictly subordinate to the ruling class,and naturally regarded it with a mingled feeling of respect and jealousy.The British merchant felt his superiority in business to the average country-gentleman;he got no direct share of the pensions and sinecures which so profoundly affected the working of the political machinery,and yet his highest ambition was to rise to be himself a member of the class,and to found a family which might flourish in the upper atmosphere.The industrial classes were inclined to favour political progress within limits.They were dissenters because the church was essentially part of the aristocracy;and they were readiest to denounce the abuses from which they did not profit.