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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
Vol. 13 (May, 1854)
George Stephenson.
WHEN the very paper you are now perusing, gentle reader, has
travelled tens or hundreds of miles upon the iron road drawn by the
locomotive engine at the rate of thirty miles an hour, without
creating one emotion of surprise, or exciting in you an exclamation
of astonishment, you can scarcely be expected to believe that thirty
years ago, the man whose name heads this article was called a fool,
a madman, and a dreamer, because he undertook to make a locomotive
travel ten! Yet such was the case, and all the facilities of
land locomotion that we now possess, all the good that railways as
social revolutionizers have done, the increase of commerce, and the
strengthening of friendly relations between city and city, State and
State, that iron roads have effected, we owe to the indomitable
courage, heroism, perseverance, and energy of the self-taught,
self-made George Stephenson. Not only this, but to him are we
also indebted for the “Geordy” safety lamp, for the invention of
which he has had the heartfelt blessing of many a poor miner who had
nothing else to give. Let us know the history of this man’s
struggles, said the world, let us know the secret of his success,
and give us an opportunity to compare him with the mighty dead whose
lives are to us as household words. This has been done.
We have before us the “Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer,”
by Samuel Smiles, published by Ticknor & Fields, Boston; a modest,
unpretending volume, just in fact what it should be, quiet and
strong. Of the work of the biographer, we cannot say too much.
There is not one page of dry reading in the book, from the moment
you take it in hand to the close. You are engrossed, absorbed;
it is a story, not a life, full of incidents, each pregnant with
results that have changed the aspect of the world. The reader
follows, as through an enchanted grove, the career of this noble
mall. It is a book that should be on every shelf, and children
should have it read to them that they may learn lessons of
self-reliance. For the personal gratification that the author
has afforded us, we are grateful, and we know that each reader will
be laid under the same debt. Heartily do we wish the book
success, sincerely can we recommend it to all, for it is a worthy
monument to a great man, to a high priest of the nineteenth century
civilization, George Stephenson!
――――♦――――
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Vol. II. (1858)
The Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer.
By SAMUEL SMILES.
From the Fourth London Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
THERE is
something sublime about railway engineers. But what shall we say of
the pioneer of this almost superhuman profession? The world would
give much to know what Vulcan, Hercules, Theseus, and other
celebrities of that sort, really did in their mortal lives to win
the places they now occupy in our classical dictionaries, and what
sort of people they really were. But whatever they did, manifestly
somebody, within a generation or two, has done something quite as
memorable. Whether the world is quite awake to the fact or not, it
has lately entered on a new order of ages. Formerly it hovered about
shores, and built its Tyres, Venices, Amsterdams, and London only
near navigable waters, because it was easier to traverse a thousand
miles of fluid than a hundred miles of solid surface. Now the case
is nearly reversed. The iron rail is making the continent all coast,
anywhere near neighbour to everywhere, and central cities as
populous as seaports. Not only is all the fertility of the earth
made available, but fertility itself can be made by our new power of
transportation.
Who more than other man or men has done this? Is there any chance
for a new mythology? Can we make a Saturn of Solomon de Caus, who
caught a prophetic glimpse of the locomotive two hundred years ago,
and went to a mad-house, without going mad, because a cardinal had
the instinct to see that the hierarchy would get into hot water by
allowing the French monarch to encourage steam? Can we make a
Jupiter of Mr. Hudson, one bull having been plainly sacrificed to
him? and shall Robert Schuyler serve us for Pluto? Shall we find
Neptune, with his sleeves rolled up, on the North River, commanding
the first practical steamboat, under the name of Robert Fulton?
However this may be, we think Mr. Smiles has made out a quite
available demigod in his well-sketched Railway Engineer. George
Stephenson did not invent the railway or the locomotive, but he did
first put the breath of its life into the latter. He built the first
locomotive that could work more economically than a horse, and by so
doing became the actual father of the railroad system. In 1814, he
found out and applied the steam-blast, whereby the waste steam from
the cylinders is used to increase the combustion, so that the harder
the machine works, the greater is its power to work. From that
moment he foresaw what has since happened, and fought like a Titan
against the world—the men of land, the men of science, and the men
of law—to bring it about.
But before we go farther, who was this George Stephenson? A
collier-boy,—his father fireman to an old pumping-engine which
drained a Northumbrian coal-mine,—his highest ambition of boyhood to
be “taken on” to have something to do about the mine. And he was
taken on to pick over the coal, and finally to groom the engine,
which he did with the utmost care and veneration, learning how to
keep it well and doctor it when ill. He took wonderfully to
steam-engines, and finally, for their sake, to his letters, at the
age of seventeen! He became steam-engineer to large mines. Of his
own genius and humanity, he studied the nature of fire-damp
explosions, and, what is not more wonderful than well proven,
invented a miner’s safety-lamp, on the same principle as Sir
Humphrey Davy’s, and tested it at the risk of his life, a month or
two before Sir Humphrey invented his, or published a syllable about
it to the world! He engineered the Stockton and Darlington Railway. He was thereupon appointed engineer of the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway. Though the means of transportation between those cities,
some thirty miles, were so inadequate that it took longer to get
cotton conveyed from Liverpool to Manchester than from New York to
Liverpool, yet it was with the utmost difficulty that a grant of the
right to build a railway could be obtained from Parliament. There
was little faith in such roads, and still less in steam-traction. The land-owners were opposed to its passage through their domains,
and obliged Mr. Stephenson to survey by stealth or at the risk of a
broken head. So great was this opposition, that the projectors were
fain to lay out their road for four miles across a remarkable Slough
of Despond, called Chat Moss, where a scientific civil-engineer
testified before Parliament that he did not think it practicable to
make a railway, or, if practicable, at not less cost than £270,000
for cutting and embankment. George Stephenson, after being almost
hooted out of the witness-box for testifying that it could be done,
and that locomotives could draw trains over it and elsewhere at the
rate of twelve miles an hour,—for which last extravagance his own
friends rebuked him,—carried the road over Chat Moss for £28,000,
and his friends over that at the rate of thirty miles an hour. Thus
he broke the back of the war, and lived to fill England with
railroads as the fruits of his victory; all which, and a great deal
more of the same sort, the reader will find admirably told by Mr.
Smiles,—albeit we cannot but smile too, that, when addressing the
universal English people, he expects them to understand such
provincialisms as wage for wages, leading coals for carrying coal,
and the like. But, nevertheless, his freedom from literary pretence
is really refreshing, and his thoroughness in matters of fact is
worthy of almost unlimited commendation. On the important question,
Who invented the locomotive steam-blast? had Mr. Smiles made in his
book as good use of his materials as he has since elsewhere, he
would have saved some engineers and one or two mechanical editors
from putting their feet into unpleasant places. Our Railroad
Manuals, that have adopted the error of attributing this great
invention to “Timothy Hackworth, in 1827,” should be made to read,
“George Stephenson, in 1814.” Their authors, and all others, should
read Samuel Smiles, the uppermost, by a whole sky, of all railway
biographers.
――――♦――――
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Volume 90 (April 1860)
1. Self-Help; with
Illustrations of Character and Conduct. By SAMUEL
SMILES, Author of “The
Life of George Stephenson.” Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
1860. 16mo. pp. 408.
2. The Same. New York: Harper
and Brothers. 1860. 12mo. pp. 363.
IN a brief and
interesting Preface to this volume, Mr. Smiles relates the
circumstances which led to its preparation, and which in themselves
afford a striking illustration of his subject. About fifteen
years ago, as he informs us, he was invited to deliver a lecture
before a class for mutual improvement, which had grown up from a
very small beginning in one of the towns in the North of England.
He accepted the invitation, though he had but little faith in
popular lectures; and “he addressed them on more than one occasion,
citing examples of what other men had done, as illustrations of what
each might, in a greater or less degree, do for himself, and
pointing out that their happiness and well-being as individuals in
after life must necessarily depend mainly upon themselves,—upon
their own diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and
self-control,—and, above all, on that upright and honest performance
of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character.”
The good seed thus scattered fell on fertile ground; and one
evening, some years afterward, he received a visit from one of these
young men who had prospered in fortune, and who “was pleased to
remember with gratitude the words spoken in all honesty to him and
to his fellow-pupils years before, and even to attribute some
measure of his success in life to the endeavours which he had made
to work up to their spirit.” His interest in the subject of
self-help having been thus revived, Mr. Smiles was induced to
prosecute his inquiries still further, to write the Life of
George Stephenson, who had formed one of the principal
illustrations in his lectures, and also to prepare the volume now on
our table.
Its spirit and aim are sufficiently shown in the citation
already given; and in the development of his plan, Mr. Smiles
exhibits the same modest ability which characterizes his Life of
Stephenson. His work comprises a thorough and systematic
discussion of his subject, and is written in a pleasing and graphic
style. It opens with a suggestive chapter on “Self-Help,
National and Individual,” which is designed to form a general
introduction, while the remaining twelve chapters illustrate special
phases of the subject. Among them are chapters on the “Leaders
of Industry,” “Scientific Pursuits,” “Workers in Art,” “Business
Qualities,” “Self-Culture,” and “Character.” The whole is
illustrated by numerous anecdotes and short biographical sketches
admirably chosen to enforce the lessons which they are designed to
teach. Mr. Smiles possesses great skill in the delineation of
character, and his gallery of portraits offers many striking
examples for study and imitation. His acquaintance with
biographical literature is very extensive; and no reader can fail to
be struck with the variety and richness of his materials.
These materials are made easily accessible by means of a copious and
well-arranged Index, and the volume is also furnished with
running-titles.
――――♦――――
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Volume 92 (January 1861)
Brief Biographies. By SAMUEL
SMILES, Author of
“Self-Help,” and “Life of George Stephenson.” With Steel
Portraits. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1861. 16mo.
pp. 517.
THIS volume
comprises a collection of thirty-five biographical sketches,
reprinted for the most part from English periodicals, and now
brought together at the suggestion of the American publishers.
They are in general mere portraits in outline, without any attempt
at an elaborate delineation of character, and with few biographical
details. But they exhibit a considerable degree of
acquaintance with the topics discussed, and are characterized by the
same qualities which mark Mr. Smiles’s previous and more elaborate
works. Among the subjects of the sketches are poets and
inventors, scholars and statesmen, writers of fiction and
historians, critics and men of science; and this wide range of
subjects indicates at once the catholicity of the writer’s taste,
and the cause of his occasional failures to give a clear view of the
lives and characters described. Few persons could treat such
diverse topics with equal success as to all of them; and in the case
of Mr. Smiles this difficulty is enhanced by the extreme brevity to
which he has sometimes restricted himself. Thus many of his
sketches do not extend beyond nine or ten pages, and the longest and
best of them, the memoir of James Watt, covers but little more than
fifty pages. With this qualification the volume is interesting
and instructive. Its style, however, is sometimes careless and
inelegant, indicating haste in the preparation of many of the
papers, and on the whole it gives a much less favourable idea of Mr.
Smiles’s powers than we derive from his other works.
――――♦――――
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Vol. 95 (July 1862)
Lives of the Engineers, with an Account of their
principal works; comprising also a history of Inland Communication
in Britain. By SAMUEL SMILES.
With Portraits and numerous Illustrations. Vols. I. and II. London:
John Murray. 1861. 8vo. pp. xvii. and 484, 502.
FROM our previous
acquaintance with Mr. Smiles’s writings we were inclined to look
with interest for his new work, in the expectation of finding in it
much that was both new and instructive, and these anticipations have
been more than realized. The field of inquiry which he has marked
out for himself has been comparatively neglected by other writers.
Yet it possesses many attractive points, and no one could have been
more successful than Mr. Smiles in bringing them out into a clear
light. His knowledge of general literature is extensive and
accurate; his industry is well-directed and persistent; and his
style, without exhibiting much elegance or felicity of expression,
is uniformly simple and perspicuous. The plan of his work, so far as
it may be gathered from the two volumes now published, has been
judiciously formed, and is skilfully elaborated. It includes a wide
range of topics, each of which is of intrinsic interest or
importance, and it affords ample scope for the exhibition of Mr. Smiles’s uncommon skill as a biographer. His work cannot, indeed,
possess so great a unity of interest as binds together Lord
Campbell’s “Lives of the Chancellors,” or Dr. Hook’s “Lives of the
Archbishops of Canterbury”; but the common relation to the history
of civil engineering in England which was borne by the different
persons whose lives are narrated, gives to his biographies such a
degree of unity as warrants their publication in a connected form.
The two volumes now before us are, we suppose, only an instalment of
a rather voluminous work, though the writer’s plan is nowhere
distinctly stated. They are divided into eight parts of unequal
length, of which three are of a general character, and may be
regarded as almost purely introductory, while each of the others is
confined to the life of some one person. The First Part is devoted
to an account of the “Early Works of Embanking and Draining,” and
includes a description of the works undertaken for draining Romney
Marsh and the Great Level of the Fens. The Second Part contains the
“Life of Sir Hugh Myddelton,” the once famous engineer of the New
River Water-Works for supplying the city of London. The Third Part
treats of the “Early Roads and Modes of Travelling” in England, and
sketches the life of John Metcalf, a blind and self-taught engineer,
who acquired considerable local reputation in his own day, and well
deserves the honour Mr. Smiles awards him. To us this is in many
respects the most attractive division of his work. The Fourth Part,
which also comprises much curious and interesting matter, relates to
the early “Bridges, Ferries, and Harbours.” The last four Parts
contain the Lives of James Brindley, whose name will be forever
associated with the Duke of Bridgewater’s Canal, of John Smeaton,
the engineer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, of John Rennie, who
constructed the Waterloo and London Bridges and the Plymouth
Breakwater, and of Thomas Telford, one of the greatest engineers of
this century, who built the suspension bridge over the Menai Strait,
and was connected with many other important works. All of these
topics, both general and special, Mr. Smiles has studied with a
genuine love of his subject, and he has brought together much that
would soon have perished, like all other traditional accounts, but
which is well worth preserving. His volumes, we ought to add, are
profusely illustrated with maps and plans from the magnificent
ordnance surveys, and with other engravings.
In his Preface, Mr. Smiles gives some curious details as to the late
growth of mechanical skill in England. One passage is so striking
and suggestive, that we cannot refrain from quoting it at length,
both as a fair specimen of his style, and on account of its
intrinsic interest.
“Most of our modern branches of industry,” he says,
“were begun by
foreigners, many of whom were driven by persecution to seek an
asylum in England. Our first cloth-workers, silk-weavers, and
lace-makers were French and Flemish refugees. The brothers Elers,
Dutchmen, began the pottery manufacture; Spillman, a German, erected
the first paper-mill at Dartford; and Boomen, a Dutchman, brought
the first coach into England.
“When we wanted any skilled work done, we almost invariably sent for
foreigners to do it. Our first ships were built by Danes or Genoese. When the Mary Rose sank at Spithead in 1545, Venetians were hired to
raise her. On that occasion Peeter de Andreas was employed, assisted
by his ship-carpenter and three of his sailors, with ‘sixty English
maryners to attend upon them.’ When an engine was required to pump
water from the Thames for the supply of London, Peter Morice, the
Dutchman, was employed to erect it.
“Our first lessons in mechanical and civil engineering were
principally obtained from Dutchmen, who supplied us with our first
wind-mills, water-mills, and pumping-engines. Holland even sent us
the necessary labourers to execute our first great works of
drainage. The Great Level of the Fens was drained by Vermuyden, and
another Dutchman, Freestone, was employed to reclaim the marsh near
Wells, in Norfolk. Canvey Island, near the mouth of the Thames, was
embanked by Joas Croppenburgh and his company of Dutch workmen. When
a new haven was required at Yarmouth, Joas Johnson, the Dutch
engineer, was employed to plan and construct the works; and when a
serious breach occurred in the banks of the Witham, at Boston,
Matthew Hake was sent for from Gravelines in Flanders; and he
brought with him not only the mechanics, but the manufactured iron
required for the work. The art of bridge-building had sunk so low in
England about the middle of the last century, that we were under the
necessity of employing the Swiss engineer Labelye to build
Westminster Bridge.”
――――♦――――
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
Volume 96 (April 1863)
Lives of the Engineers, with an Account of their
principal Works; comprising also a History of Inland Communication
in Britain. By SAMUEL
SMILES. With Portraits
and numerous Illustrations. Vol. III. [George and Robert
Stephenson.] London: John Murray. 1862. 8vo. pp. xxi.
and 512.
MR.
SMILES’S
Life of George Stephenson is one of the best and most popular
biographies which have been published within the last ten years; and
the author has decided wisely in including it in his Lives of the
Engineers, instead of attempting to write an entirely new
memoir. During the interval which has elapsed since the first
publication of the work, some new facts and anecdotes have become
known to him, and in the reprint which forms the substance of the
volume now before us these have been inserted in the proper place;
some passages have been omitted, in order that the topics discussed
in them might be treated with greater fullness elsewhere, or because
they had little connection with the principal subject; and numerous
verbal alterations have been made. These additions, omissions,
and changes, so far as they relate to the life, character, or works
of George Stephenson, are obvious improvements; and if no other
additions had been made, they would render the memoir still more
worthy of the popularity it has enjoyed. But the author has
deliberately sacrificed all the advantages which his work would have
derived from this careful revision, by incorporating with the text a
short account of the life of Robert Stephenson, instead of appending
it to the memoir of the elder Stephenson, as a separate and
independent biography. It is true that there was a closer
relation between the two than ordinarily exists between a father and
a son; but this connection was not of such a character as to render
it expedient to narrate their lives in one memoir, and the
disadvantages of writing biography after such a method are so
obvious, that it is to be hoped no subsequent writer will be tempted
to follow the example. There was enough of incident in the
life of Robert Stephenson to give interest to a separate memoir; and
certainly his achievements as a railway engineer, and above all in
the construction of the Britannia Bridge, were sufficient to justify
such an honour to his memory. As it is, the reader of Mr. Smiles’s volume who is already familiar with the career of the elder
Stephenson, and who wishes to become acquainted with the life of the
younger, must laboriously cull the facts from a large amount of old
and irrelevant matter; and the same remark is equally applicable to
the Life of George Stephenson, in the form in which Mr.
Smiles has seen fit to print it. If the passages relating to
his son which have been inserted were removed, the continuity of the
narrative would be unbroken, and every one could see at a glance how
carefully Mr. Smiles has revised his earlier work, and how much it
has been improved.
――――♦――――
CONTINENTAL MONTHLY
Vol. V. (1864)
INDUSTRIAL
BIOGRAPHY: IRON
WORKERS AND TOOL
MAKERS. By SAMUEL
SMILES, Author of
‘Self-Help,’ ‘Brief Biographies,’ and ‘Life of George Stephenson.’
‘The true Epic of our time, is not Arms but, Tools and
Man—an infinitely wider kind of Epic.’ Boston: Ticknor &
Fields.
THIS book may be
considered as a continuation of the Series of Memoirs of Industrial
Men introduced in Mr. Smiles’s ‘Lives of Engineers.’ The author says
that ‘while commemorating the names of those who have striven-to
elevate man above the material and mechanical, the labours of the
important industrial class, to whom society owes so much of its
comfort and well-being, are also entitled to consideration. Without
derogating from the biographic claims of those who minister to
intellect and taste, those who minister to utility need not be
overlooked.’
Surely the object of this book is a good one. The mechanic should
receive his meed of appreciation. Our constructive heroes should not
be forgotten, for the heroism of inventive labour has its own
romance, and its results aid greatly the cause of human advancement. Most of the information embodied in this volume has heretofore
existed only in the memories of the eminent mechanical engineers
from whom it has been collected. Facts are here placed on record
which would, in the ordinary course of things, have passed into
oblivion. All honour to the brave, patient, ingenious, and inventive
mechanic!
――――♦――――
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Vol. XIII. (1864)
Industrial Biography: Iron-Workers and Tool-Makers.
By SAMUEL SMILES,
Author of “Self-Help,” “Brief Biographies,” and “Life of George
Stephenson.” Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
THE history of
iron is the history of civilization. The rough, shapeless ore that
lies hidden in the earth folds in its unlovely bosom such fate and
fortune as the haughtier sheen of silver, gleam of gold, and sparkle
of diamond may illustrate, but are wholly impotent to create. Rising
from his undisturbed repose of ages, the giant, unwieldy, swart, and
huge of limb, bends slowly his brawny neck to the yoke of man, and
at his bidding becomes a nimble servitor to do his will. Subtile as
thought, rejoicing in power, no touch is too delicate for his
perception, no service too mighty for his strength. Tales of faërie,
feats of magic, pale before the simple story of his every-day
labour, or find in his deeds the facts which they but faintly
shadowed forth. And waiting upon his transformation, a tribe becomes
a nation, a race of savages rises up philosophers, artists,
gentlemen.
Commerce, science, warfare have their progress and their
vicissitudes; but underneath them all, unnoted, it may be, or
treated to a superficial and perhaps supercilious glance, yet
mainspring and regulator of all, runs an iron thread, true thread of
Fate, coiling around the limbs of man, and impeding all
progress, till he shall have untwisted its Gordian knot, but bidding
him forward from strength to strength with each successive release. No romance of court or camp surpasses the romance of the forge. A
blacksmith at his anvil seems to us a respectable, but not an
eminently heroic person; yet, walking backward along the past by the
light which he strikes from the glowing metal beneath his hand, we
shall fancy ourselves to be walking in the true heroic age. Kings
and warriors have brandished their swords right royally, and such
splendour has flashed from Excalibur and Morglay that our dazzled
eyes have scarcely discerned the brawny smith who not only stood in
the twilight of the background and fashioned with skilful hand the
blade which radiates such light, but passed through all the land,
changing huts into houses, houses into homes, and transforming into
a garden by his skill the wilderness which bad been rescued by the
sword. Vigorous brains, clear eyes, sturdy arms have wrought out,
not without blood, victories more potent, more permanent, more
heroic, than those of the battle-field.
Such books as this under consideration give us only materials for
the great epic of iron, but with such materials we can make our own
rhythm and harmony. From the feeble beginning of the savage,
rejoicing in the fortunate possession of two old nails, and deriving
a sufficient income from letting them out to his neighbours for the
purpose of boring holes, down to the true Thor’s hammer, so
tractable to the master’s hand that it can chip without breaking the
end of an egg in a glass on the anvil, crack a nut without touching
the kernel, or strike a blow of ten tons eighty times in a minute,
we have a steady onward movement. Prejudice builds its solid
breakwaters; ignorance, inability, clumsiness, and awkwardness raise
such obstacles as they can; but the delay of a century is but a
moment. Slowly and surely the waters rise till they sweep away all
obstacles, over-top all barriers, and plunge forward again with ever
accelerating force. The record of iron is at once a record of our
glory and of our humiliation,—a record of marvellous, inborn,
God-given genius, reaching forth in manifold directions to compass
most beneficent ends, but baffled, thwarted, fiercely and
persistently resisted by obstinacy, blindness, and stupidity, and
gaining its ends, if it gain them at all, only by address the most
sagacious, courage the most invincible, and perseverance the most
untiring. Every great advance in mechanical skill has been met by
the determined hostility of men who fancied their craft to be in
danger. An invention which enabled a hand of iron to do the work of
fifty hands of flesh and blood was considered guilty of taking the
bread from the thrice fifty mouths that depended on those hands’
labour, and was not infrequently visited with the punishment due to
such guilt. No demonstrated fruitlessness of similar fears in the
past served to allay fears for the future; no inefficiency of brute
force permanently to stay the enterprise of the mind prevented brute
force from making its futile and sometimes fatal attempts. It is no
matter that increased facility of production has been attended by an
increased demand for the product; it is no matter that ingenuity has
never been held permanently back from its carefully conned plans;
there have not been wanting men, numerous, ignorant, and ignoble
enough to collect in mobs, raze workshops, destroy machinery, chase
away inventors, and fancy, that, so employed, they have been engaged
in the work of self-protection.
It is such indirect lessons as may be learned from these and other
statements that give this book its chief value. The interesting
historical and mechanical information contained in its pages makes
it indeed well worthy of perusal; yet for that alone we should not
take especial pains to set it before the people. But its incidental
teachings ought to be taken to heart by every man, and especially
every mechanic, who has any ambition or conscience beyond the
exigencies of bread and butter. Lack of ambition is not an American
fault, but it is too often an ambition that regards irrelevant and
factitious honours rather than those to which it may legitimately
and laudably aspire. A mechanic should find in the excellence of his
mechanism a greater reward and satisfaction than in the wearing of a
badge of office which any fifth-rate lawyer or broken-down
man-of-business with influential “friends” may obtain, and whose
petty duties they may discharge quite as well as well as the
first-rate mechanic. The mechanic who is master of his calling need
yield to none. We would not have him like the ironmongers denounced
by the old religious writer as “heathenish in their manners, puffed
up with pride, and inflated with worldly prosperity”; but we would
have him mindful of his true dignity. In the importance of the
results which he achieves, in the magnitude of the honours he may
win, in the genius he may employ and the skill he may attain, no
profession or occupation presents a more inviting field than his;
but it will yield fruits only to the good husbandman. Science and
art give up their treasures only to him who is capable of enthusiasm
and devotion. He alone who magnifies his office makes it honourable. Whether he work in marble, canvas, or iron, the man who is content
simply to follow his occupation, and is not possessed by it, may be
an artificer, but will not be an artist, nor ever wear the laurel on
his brow. He should be so enamoured of his calling as to court it
for its own charms. Invention is a capricious mistress, and does not
always bestow her favours on the most worthy. Men not a few have
died in poverty, and left a golden harvest to their successors; yet
the race is often enough to the swift, and the battle to the strong,
to justify men in striving after strength and swiftness, as well for
the guerdon which they bring as for the jubilant consciousness which
they impart. And this, at least, is sure: though merit may, by some
rare mischance, be overlooked, demerit has no opportunity whatever
to gain distinction. Sleight of hand cannot long pass muster for
skill of hand. Unswerving integrity, unimpeachable sincerity, is the
lesson constantly taught by the lives of these renowned mechanics. “The great secret,” says one, “is to have the courage to be
honest,—a spirit to purchase the best material, and the means and
disposition to do justice to it in the manufacture.” Another,
remonstrated with for his high charges, which were declared to be
six times more than the price his employers had before been paying
for the same articles, could safely say, “That may be, but mine are
more than six times better.” A master of his profession is master of
his employers. Maudslay’s works, we are told, came to be regarded as
a first-class school for mechanical engineers, the Oxford and
Cambridge of mechanics; nor can Oxford and Cambridge men be any
prouder of their connection with their colleges than distinguished
engineers of their connection with this famous school of Maudslay. With such an esprit de corps what excellence have we not a right to
expect?
We cannot forbear pointing out the Aids to Humility collected in
this book from various quarters, and presented to the consideration
of the nineteenth century. Our boasted age of invention turns out,
after all, to have been only gathering up what antiquity has let
fall,—rediscovering and putting to practical account what the past
discovered, but could not, or, with miscalled dignity, would not,
turn to the uses of common life. Steam-carriages, hydraulic engines,
diving-bells, which we have regarded with so much complacency as our
peculiar property, worked their wonders in the teeming brain of an
old monk who lived six hundred years ago. Printing, stereotypes,
lithography, gunpowder, Colt’s revolvers and Armstrong guns,
Congreve rockets, coal-gas and chloroform, daguerreotypes,
reaping-machines, and the electric telegraph are nothing new under
the sun. Hundreds of years ago the idea was born, but the world was
too young to know its character or prize its service, and so the
poor little bantling was left to shiver itself to death while the
world stumbled on as aforetime. How many eras of birth there may
have been we do not know, but it was reserved for our later age to
receive the young stranger with open arms, and nourish his infant
limbs to manly strength. Richly are we rewarded in the precision and
power with which he performs our tasks, in the comfort with which
he enriches, the beauty with which he adorns, and the knowledge with
which he ennobles our daily life.
――――♦――――
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
Vol. 17 (March 1866)
Lives of Boulton and Watt.
Principally from the original Soho MSS. Comprising also a History of
the Invention and Introduction of the Steam-Engine. By SAMUEL
SMILES. London:
John Murray.
THE author of
this book is an enthusiast in biography. He has given the best
years of his life to the task of recording the struggles and
successes of men who have laboured for the good of their kind; and
his own name will always be honourably mentioned in connection with
Stephenson, Watt, Flaxman, and others, of whom he has written so
well. Of all his published books, next to “Self-Help,” this
volume, lately issued, is his most interesting one. James
Watt, with his nervous sensibility, his headaches, his pecuniary
embarrassments, and his gloomy temperament, has never till now been
revealed precisely as he lived and struggled. The extensive
collection of Soho documents to which Mr. Smiles had access has
enabled him to add so much that is new and valuable to the story of
his hero’s career, that hereafter this biography must take the first
place as a record of the great inventor.
As a tribute to Boulton, so many years the friend, partner,
and consoler of Watt, the book is deeply interesting. Fighting
many a hard battle for his timid, shrinking associate, Boulton
stands forth a noble representative of strength, courage, and
perseverance. Never was partnership more admirably conducted;
never was success more richly earned. Mr. Smiles is neither a
Macaulay nor a Motley, but he is so honest and earnest in every work
he undertakes, he rarely fails to make a book deeply instructive and
entertaining.
――――♦――――
THE NEW ENGLANDER
Vol. XXVII. (1868)
The Huguenots: their
settlements, churches, and industries in England and Ireland. By SAMUEL
SMILES, author of
“Self-help,” &c. With an Appendix relating to the Huguenots in
America. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1868.
SMILES’S
“HUGUENOTS.”—Mr. Smiles’s “Huguenots” is a compilation of almost
encyclopaedic fullness and variety in its facts and incidents. Such
collections of facts and statistics are usually dry and
uninteresting for ordinary and continuous reading, however valuable
they may be for occasional reference. This book, however, is an
exception to the general rule. It has all the interest of the most
exciting romance. We should say, rather, of many romances, for each
separate story is in its turn as exciting as the one which went
before. These recitals of the exposures, the escapes, the
sufferings, and the final deliverance of many of the noblest men and
women of their time, or of any time, excite alternately one's
detestation of the system which dictated, and the government which
executed, these infernal persecutions at intervals, for more than a
century;—to the ruin of France and the upbuilding of Protestant
Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands, in arts, in arms, in
political freedom, and in the ascendency of the Protestant interest. To the separate topics suggested by all these particulars, the
author of this volume does ample justice, and, in the several
chapters which treat of these several points, he has contributed
valuable information concerning the progress of European
civilization in the 16th and 17th centuries. We know no book better
fitted than this to awaken a decided Protestant feeling in the mind
of the scholar, or to confirm an intelligent Protestant zeal in the
hearts of the people. That there is an amiable side in the lives and
characters of many of the ecclesiastics of the Romish church, we do
not deny. But that there is a diabolical side in its persecuting
spirit and its political intrigues, ought never to be forgotten. We
sympathize with the trusting devotion and the delightful weakness of
Mademoiselle de Guérin. We excuse the devoted piety of Madame Swetchine, and are almost ready to conclude that Catholicism is the
system which is especially suited for the French. But the horrors
which attended the exodus of the Huguenots take the very breath out
of our sympathy, and abate the warmth of our admiration. No
intelligent Protestant can ever see or hear of the church of St. Germain d’ Auxerrois, without a thrill of horror. Even the
constrained urbanity and the courteous civility of the well schooled
conductors of the Catholic World cannot eradicate the memories and
associations of St. Bartholomew’s.
One interesting fact is noticed in this book which throws a flood of
light upon the relations of the Church of England to the reformed
Churches of the continent in the days of Queen Elizabeth, as
contrasted with the new doctrines upon this subject which were
broached in the days of the Stuarts, and which are so industriously
and arrogantly propagated not only by the Stubbs and Boggs of our
time, but are countenanced, we are sorry to say, to a certain
extent, by the elder Dr. Tyng. In 1564, a portion of the crypt of
the Cathedral church in Canterbury, was granted by the Archbishop,
with the sanction of the Queen, to the Huguenot refugees as a place
of worship, and it has been occupied by their descendants till the
present day. This “under croft,” or crypt is directly beneath the
high altar and the choir of the Cathedral. That Presbyterian worship
has been regularly maintained for more than three hundred years,
directly under the throne of the Primate of England, is a fact that
cannot be denied. We commend it to the consideration of all parties
who may be sufficiently enlightened to draw from it the appropriate
inferences.
――――♦――――
THE MANUFACTURER AND BUILDER
Vol. I. (1869)
George and Robert Stephenson.
By Samuel Smiles. New-York: Harper & Brothers. 1868.
DR.
SAMUEL SMILES, for many years Secretary of the London and
South-western Railway, and author of Self-Help, The
Huguenots, and some lesser works, has produced a biography of
George Stephenson, the father of railroads in somewhat the same
sense as Washington was the father of his country. The present issue
by the Harpers is constituted by a revised edition of the Life of
George Stephenson as originally printed, and contains new matter of
peculiar value, not so especially as regards the biography of the
great engineer, whose name has answered to intitulate the volume, as
in respect to the history of invention in the application of steam
to locomotion. This portion of the present publication, however,
though new in this particular connection, is by no means uniquely
new matter, being drawn from the Lives of the Engineers, containing
memoirs of Boulton and Watt. The memoir of Captain Trevithick, who
was, in his age, to invention what Shakespeare, in his age, was to
the drama, embodies, on the other hand, a great deal of valuable
matter, and is probably the most complete biography of that erratic
engineer which has ever been printed.
A glance at the preface of Mr. Smiles demonstrates it to be, in some
respects, the most valuable portion of his book—valuable in its
completeness as an exhibit of the statistics of the English railway
system—and those even who are so fortunate as to possess the first
edition of this work, which appeared in 1857, will find the preface
of the present reissue quite worth the price of a second copy as an
appendix to the former.
The paper—for the preface is rather a paper than a preface—sets out
with a compend of European railway statistics, reviews the progress
of railway enterprise in Italy, which received a new impulse in
1865, passes to the subject of railway construction in India, with
its statistics, and ends with a brief statistical review of the
railway interest of the United States. En passant, the
Canadian system is digested and discussed—for, be it remembered, the
Canadian system was in its babyhood when Mr. Smiles’s first edition
appeared. The Grand Trunk had only been begun, and the Victoria
Bridge—a monument among railway structures—was less than half
completed.
Passing over a few pages, which are rather historical gossip than
historical matter, the preface may be taken up with profit at page
8, where the author begins an elaborate statistical survey of the
railways of the United Kingdom, with incidental comments as to the
effect of the introduction of steam in giving consistency and
stability to the civilization of the century, which continues to
page 17, whence the remainder of the preface is the very pressed
cream of information—the few pages on the agency of railways in the
feeding of London, and the statistics of that agency, being of great
value, not only as illustrative of the subject in hand, but as
comparative statistics of the consumption of alimentary staples in
that metropolis of manufactures and trade. It would be impossible to
reduce this information to synopsis, since it is synoptical in
itself; and those who would possess themselves of a complete
statistical exhibit of how London is fed, must procure the book and
peruse the original paper. Prepared in 1868, its statistics are very
minutely applicable to 1869, and will remain proportionately
applicable for the next decade at least. The preface to the edition
of 1864 is also incorporated; but, being merely prefatorial, it may
be dismissed without comment. Rapid internal communication has
introduced a new law into the history of civilization, which may be
estimated to have been developed within a century—mostly within half
a century. In early ages, civilization was developed altogether by a
sort of curdling process; and wherever there was room for diffusion,
there humanity remained stationary, or at least effected little
progress. Thus, it is observed, the first eras of historical
civilization were developed in small peninsulas, as that of Greece,
where circumscription of space, preventing further diffusion, gave
rise to continued social contact, to invention, to progress, to
civilization. The same law holds good as to the civilization of
Egypt, one of the earliest, and may be regarded as the law of
civilization in all its phases as represented in ancient history. The word phases is here used advisedly, for in these ancient
civilizations (or phases of civilization) there was nothing
cosmopolitan. From their very nature and want of communication with
other centres, they were intensely individual and historically
selfish and intolerant. As to the Jews the world was peopled only by
the Jews amid the inferior races, so to the Greeks the world was
inhabited only by the Greeks and the barbarians, and who was not
Greek was necessarily barbarous.
In easy internal communication is included, therefore, the key to
the modern cosmopolitan civilization, in which the member is
considered himself not as a citizen of this or that country, but as
a citizen of the world; and with the finding of this key the history
of locomotive invention is especially associated. In fact, modern
civilization is indebted almost altogether for its cosmopolitanism
to the application of steam to travel, though later still the
telegraph has played its part in the development of this feature.
Not to lose sight of the law of the century, however, it must be
stated that the old law of circumscription of space in the
developing of civilization has been wholly nullified within fifty
years; and civilization is rather communicated, carried, and
planted than developed, which universailty of diffusion may be
traced to the speculations of Boulton, Darwin, Edgeworth, Cugnot,
Watt, Pouillet, Murdock, Symington, the eccentric Trevithick,
Stephenson, and others of the latter part of the last century and
the first quarter of the present, of which period of about fifty
years steam carriages and projects for travelling by steam
constituted the standing and stereotyped sensation.
Intellectually speaking, the most remarkable of these men were
undoubtedly, the erratic Dr. Darwin, who was a poet and a
philosopher as well as an inventor, and the eccentric Trevithick,
whose biography is a romance--the biography of a dreamer—in and of
itself.
The history of invention in this department must be divided into two
(at first) distinct processes of evolution; for, while the erratic
Dr. Darwin was ruminating upon the subject of steam carriages, and
the eccentric Captain Trevithick was busying his brain with the
construction of fiery dragons, though the horse-railroad had been
brought to considerable perfection, the combination of the two seems
not to have occurred to either, albeit Edgeworth’s paper on horse
railroads, read before the Society of Arts, constituted one of the
topics of the day, and made a more profound impression on the public
mind than the speculations of either of the former.
Nor was Edgeworth more apt at combination; for, while he did attempt
to carry out the idea of running a railroad car by wind, it seems
never to have occurred to him to try hot water, even when the
suggestion of its practicability was offered in the speculations and
experiments of his contemporaries. As to Darwin, though he petted
the hobby of a steam balloon, which may come yet, the application of
steam to the railway seems to have escaped his passion for inventive
combination. Trevithick was more fortunate, and in his Pen-y-darran
engine came near solving the problem, actually using an engine upon
the Merthyr Tydvil tram-road, but pursuing his experiments no
further.
It was where these inventors—more brilliant than Stephenson in all
respects—left the problem that George Stephenson, patient, plodding,
and practical, took it up; and whatever maybe due to them in the way
of brilliant invention, to him is due the homer of solving the
problem of the practical application of steam to internal
communication. The life of George Stephenson is, therefore, in many
respects, cognate with the development of railway enterprise in
England, and the dull-witted son of Old Bob, who was himself the son
of a gentleman’s servant, stands forth as having had more influence
in moulding the civilization of the century than had the most
brilliant statesman, poet, or philosopher of his day.
Of the volume submitted, one need say nothing in the way of
criticism, since of a twelfth edition little can be cleverly said.
The materials of the author have been drawn from authentic sources,
or rather from those sources most likely to be authentic; Robert
Stephenson, the son of the pioneer, having been the principal
reliance of Mr. Smiles in sifting information; and though one might
suspect some little partiality, considering this fact, still no
taint of it appears. From Mr. Edward Pease, of Darlington, Mr.
Dixon, C. E., Mr. Sopwith, R. S., Mr. Parker, and Sir Joshua
Walmsley—all intimately connected with Stephenson in his early
undertakings—considerable valuable information has been drawn, while
several gentlemen, who officiated as his private secretaries at
different periods, have been laid under contribution for critical
data. The biography of his earlier years has been mostly
gathered from the personal recollections of colliers and others who
were associated with him as fellow-workmen in his youth.
To trace the history of the locomotive as Stephenson found it to the
date of the successful operation of the Stockton and Darlington
Railway would be interesting, perhaps, but would deal with details
too familiar to need repetition. October 10th, 1825, marks the date
of application of steam to passenger transit, and may well be ranked
as an era in the history of civilization. The “experiment“ is no
longer an experiment, and in its success cosmopolitanism has taken
the place of provincialism or nationalism, while the very law of
civilization, as it pertained to ancient history, has given place to
a new law of diffusion.
A valuable memoir of Robert Stephenson, son of the elder, has been
incorporated with the present edition, the literary execution of
which, though rather verbose in style and rather English and heavy
withal, is lucid and well articulated.
――――♦――――
MANUFACTURER AND BUILDER
Volume 8 (March 1876)
Thrift. By Samuel Smiles. New York:
Harper & Brothers.
THIS useful book
is intended as a sequel to “Self-Help” and “Character,” both also
published by Messrs. Harpers, and might have appeared as an
introduction to the same, thrift being the basis of self-help, and
of much that is good in the human character. The author speaks
much of the use and abuse of money, and puts in strong light the
merits of generosity, honesty, economy, and providence, versus
avarice, fraud, extravagance, and improvidence. We wish the
book in the hands of all who need it, and hope that they will read
and heed it.
――――♦――――
HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Volume 62 (February, 1881)
Duty. With Illustrations of Courage, Patience,
and Endurance. By SAMUEL
SMILES, LL.D. 12nmo, pp.
412. New York: Harper and Brothers. The Same. “Franklin
Square Library.” 4to, pp. 68. New York: Harper and Brothers.
IMPRESSED by the
powerful influence that example exerts upon conduct and character,
and acting in a line with the truth condensed by Coleridge into the
maxim, “We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire,” Mr. Samuel
Smiles has devoted a large portion of an unusually useful and
practical life to the preparation of a number of volumes which most
emphatically merit the title of the “Self-Help Series.” Written with
such vigorous plainness and simplicity as to be easily comprehended
by youthful or unpractised readers, and with such earnestness and
dignity as to conciliate their sympathy and respect, these books
present in agreeable anecdotal form, combined with pregnant moralizings and reflections which are not pursued to a forbidding
length, a large number of examples, drawn from the lives of real and
noteworthy men and women, that are worthy of study for the wholesome
influence an imitation of their virtues would exert upon the life
and morals, the welfare and happiness, of the individual and of
society.
The first of the series, Self-Help, was more especially designed to
impress young men just beginning the battle of life with the
conviction that their happiness and well-being depended largely upon
themselves—upon their diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and
self-control, their perseverance and single-mindedness, and, above
all, their honesty and uprightness. In the succeeding volume,
Character, Mr. Smiles arrayed a great number of instances of
nobility and magnanimity, as illustrated by passages in the lives of
many excellent, distinguished, or heroic persons, with the object of
making those invigorating virtues attractive to young people. This
was followed by Thrift, which, although more didactic than its
predecessors, still adhered to the personal and anecdotal treatment
that had made them attractive and influential. It was specifically
addressed to workmen, artisans, mechanics, labourers', clerks, and
men in comparatively humble circumstances, who had families
dependent upon them, and whom it sought to impress with the dignity
of labour. It also urged them to economize in order that they might
secure their personal independence, showed them how they might do so
if they were systematic and frugal, and by many strong practical
reasons and incentives endeavoured to persuade them to live clean,
sober, and manly lives, and to aim to raise themselves to a higher
elevation by the practice of morality and religion. The last of the
series, now just published, completes the round of Mr. Smiles’s
invaluable practical teachings. Its topic is Duty, its sphere, its
operation upon the conscience and as a rule of conduct, and its
effectiveness to ennoble and beautify the world by its outcome of
courage, fortitude, honesty, truthfulness, patriotism, heroism,
magnanimity, and the virtues generally, whether in prosperity or
under stress of trial and adversity, whether at home or in the
workshop, in common and every-day business avocations, or in any of
the more heroic callings in which one’s life may be cast. The volume
is a richly stored commonplace-book of inspiring and instructive
personal anecdote and incident, and also of sententious wisdom,
illustrating the influence of a loyal obedience to duty to lift a
man out of the rut of ignoble motives and base practices, and to
nerve him to the practice of the more trying and heroic virtues,
without being disabled for the exercise of the sweet charities and
the simple and ordinary offices of daily common life.
――――♦――――
HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Vol. LXXXIV. (1891)
Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist. By SAMUEL
SMILES, LL.D., Author of
Self-Help, Duty, etc. With Portrait. 12mo, Cloth, $1 25. New York:
Harper and Brothers.
THE latest
example of the power of Self-Help to whom Mr. Smiles has turned his
attention is Jacques Jasmin, Barber, Poet, Philanthropist: a man not
known in this country at all as a hair-dresser or as a lover of his
fellow-men, and only known as a poet by his story of “The Blind Girl
of Castèl-Cuillè,” translated by Mr. Longfellow many years ago. Mr.
Smiles, condensing the personal history of Jasmin’s life from
Jasmin’s own published account of it, shows us a most remarkable and
most interesting character. He was born of a crippled laundress and
a hump-backed tailor, on a raggèd bed, in the rat-haunted garret of
a miserable tenement, in the unattractive town of Agen, and at the
decrepit close of the cruel eighteenth century—the adjectives are
Jasmin's—and he died—the expression is Mr. Smiles’s—a King of
Hearts. Jasmin’s babyhood and boyhood, and even his manhood, were as
wretched and as full of unpoetic poverty and hardship as was the
scene of his birth; but Heaven helped him because he helped himself,
and because he helped others; amid the generation for whom Mr.
Smiles writes will get as much help from the example of the Barber
Poet of Gascony as they have got in other years from his lives of
the Edwardses, of the Stephensons, of the Nasmyths, and of Robert
Dick, the Botanical and the Geological Baker of Thurso [Ed.—and
correspondent of Hugh Miller]. Young men,
whether they are bakers or barbers or students of nature or students
of art or students of Football will find in this volume a wide range
of delicately implied counsel, expressed in clear and forcible
English prose, which will not only entertain but improve them.
Jasmin’s earliest efforts at verse-making were naturally imperfect. His present biographer says that he tried to imitate the works of
other poets rather than to create poetical images of his own, and
that he was influenced by the reading of the French writers,
particularly by Béranger who, like himself was the son of a tailor. His first rhymes were written upon curl-papers, and then used in a
professional way to make an impression upon the heads of his
customers! His efforts in classical French had little circulation,
therefore, other than was given them by the patrons of his shop, and
it was not until he mastered his native dialect, and began to write
in Gascon, that he met with recognition outside of hair-dressing
circles.
Robert Nicoll, the Scottish poet,
to quote Mr. Smiles, said of his own works: “I have written my heart
in my poems; and rude, unfinished, and hasty as they are, it can be
read there.” Jasmin used almost the same words. “With all my
faults,” he said, “I desired to write the truth, and I have
described it as I saw it.” In his “Recollections” he showed his
whole heart without reserve; and a good, honest, poetical heart it
was.
――――♦――――
HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE
Vol XC. (1894)
Josiah Wedgwood, F.R.S. His Personal History. By SAMUEL
SMILES, LLD. With
Portrait. 12mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 50. New York: Harper and
Brothers.
THE biographer of
Mrs. Ritchie’s hero of verse, “Jacques Jasmin, Barber, Poet,
Philanthropist,” appears this month as the author of the personal
history of Josiah Wedgwood, a shining example of that Self-Help,
Duty, Thrift, Character, Courage, Patience, and Endurance, which Dr.
Samuel Smiles has been illustrating to the world during nearly forty
years. Wedgwood was a Man of Invention and Industry, who, like Dr. Smiles’s other subjects the Stephensons, inventors; Nasmyth, the
Engineer; Dick, the Baker, the Botanist, and the Geologist; and
Edwards, the Naturalist, made himself out of lowly material, and
without the aid of any one else. He came of a family of potters—the Wedgwoods had been manufacturers of earthenware for more than two
centuries when he was born, in 1730; his family was poor; he was the
youngest of thirteen children; he left school at the age of nine,
knowing nothing but what Dr. Smiles calls “the beginnings” of
reading, writing, and arithmetic. The rest of his learning and
knowledge he accomplished himself. Like many men of action and
enterprise, he was, for the most part, his own educator; he went to
the best school that has ever existed since men began to want to
know, the School of Experience; and of all its graduates he was, in
his own particular branch of study, one of the most distinguished. As is recorded upon his tombstone, “he converted a rude and
inconsiderable manufacture into an elegant art and an important part
of national commerce”; he was a Member of the Royal and the
Antiquarian Societies; and his eulogist is a Prime Minister of
England. “If the day shall ever come,” said Mr. Gladstone, “when we
shall be as eminent in true taste as we now are in the economy of
production, my belief is that the result will probably be due to no
single man in so great a degree, as to Wedgwood.”
This is the man who is the theme of Dr. Smiles’s latest lay sermon,
preached to his great audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. He is
shown to us as he was, in straightforward, simple words of praise
and appreciation, but not of undue laudation. And underlying the
whole narrative is the old, old moral Dr. Smiles has taught so long,
that God helps those who know enough to help themselves.
――――♦――――
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