The Legend of Adam and the Stick with which he subdued the Animals. — The Stick is the Symbol of Power, and only the Hand can wield it. — The Hand imprisons Steam and Electricity, and keeps them at hard Labor. — The Destitution of England Two Hundred Years ago: a Pen Picture. — The Transformation wrought by the Hand: a Pen Picture. — It is due, not to Men who make Laws, but to Men who make Things. — The Scientist and the Inventor are the World’s Benefactors. — A Parallel between the Right Honorable William E. Gladstone and Sir Henry Bessemer. — Mr. Gladstone a Man of Ideas, Mr. Bessemer a Man of Deeds. — The Value of the latter’s Inventions. — Mr. Gladstone represents the Old Education, Mr. Bessemer the New.

It has been remarked that man is the wisest of animals because he has hands. It is equally true that he is the most powerful of animals because he has hands. It is with the hand that man has subdued all the animals. There is a legend to the effect that on the day when Adam revolted against his Maker, the animals, in their turn, revolted against him, and ceased to obey him. “Adam called on the Lord for help, and the Lord commanded him to take a branch from the nearest tree and make of it a weapon, and strike with it the first animal that should refuse to obey him. Adam took the branch, the leaves fell from it of their own accord, and he found himself furnished with a stick proportioned to his height. When the animals saw this weapon in the hands of the man they were seized with an instinctive fear mingled with wonder, and they did not dare to attack him. A lion alone, bolder than the rest, leaped upon him to devour him, but Adam, who stood upon his guard, swift as lightning whirled his stick and felled him to the earth with a single blow! At this sight the terror of the other animals was so great that they approached him trembling, and in token of their submission licked the stick that he held in his hand.”[25]

Throughout all the early ages the stick was both the symbol and the instrument of power; and it is only the hand that can grasp and wield the stick. The early kings reigned by virtue of the strong arm and the supple hand. They claimed to be descended from Hercules, and their emblem of power was a knotty stick. Nor does empire depend less upon the hand now than it did in the morning of time.

The hand no longer grasps the knotty stick; it no longer menaces mankind. But it wields the mechanical powers. It imprisons steam and electricity, and keeps them at hard labor. It makes ploughs, planters, harvesters, sewing-machines, locomotives, and steamships. It digs canals, opens mines, builds bridges, makes roads, erects mills and factories, constructs harbors and docks, reclaims waste lands, and covers the globe with tracks of steel over which the commerce of the world is borne.

Two hundred years ago England was destitute of most of these things. It had then no good dirt roads even, no good bridges, no canals, no public works worth mentioning, and scarcely any manufactories of importance. The post-bags were carried on horseback once a week. The highways were besieged by robbers. One-fifth of the community were paupers. Mechanics worked for from sixpence to a shilling a day. The chief food of the poor was rye, barley, or oats. The people were ignorant and brutal—masters beat their servants, and husbands beat their wives. Teachers used the lash as the principal means of imparting knowledge. The mob rejoiced in fights of all kinds, and shouted with glee when an eye was torn out or a finger chopped off in these savage encounters. Executions were favorite public amusements. The prisons were full, and proved to be fruitful nurseries of crime.

From little better than a wilderness, and almost a state of savagery, England has been transformed into a fruitful field, and its people raised in the scale of civilization. Its public works are the admiration of the world; its coffers are full of gold; its strong boxes are piled high with evidences of the indebtedness of other nations; its ships plough the billows of every sea, and bear the commerce of every land; and its manufactories, of vast extent, are monuments of inventive genius, industry, perseverance, and skill, more imposing far than the pyramids of Egypt or the temples of Greece and Rome.

To whom do the people of England and of the world owe this national progress, this progress in the useful arts on a scale so colossal as, by comparison, to dwarf the achievements of all the earlier epochs of history? Not to statesmen or legislators. They neither dig canals, open mines, build railways, lay ocean cables, nor erect factories. The pen in their hands may be mightier than the sword; but it is no match for the plough and the reaper, the electric battery and imprisoned steam. Legislators make laws but mechanics make things. On this subject, after an exhaustive investigation, Buckle says, “Seeing, therefore, that the efforts of government in favor of civilization are, when most successful, altogether negative, and seeing, too, that when these efforts are more than negative they become injurious, it clearly follows that all speculations must be erroneous which ascribe the progress of Europe to the wisdom of its rulers. This is an inference which rests not only on the arguments already adduced, but on facts which might be multiplied from every page of history.... We have seen that their laws in favor of industry have injured industry, that their laws in favor of religion have increased hypocrisy, and that their laws to secure truth have encouraged perjury.... But it is a mere matter of history that our legislators, even to the last moment, were so terrified by the idea of innovation that they refused every reform until the voice of the people rose high enough to awe them into submission, and forced them to grant what, without much pressure, they would by no means have conceded.”[26]

It is, then, clearly not to the men who make laws that we are indebted for progress in civilization, but to the men who make things. The scientist who discovers a new principle in physics is a public benefactor. The inventor who devises a new machine helps forward the cause of progress. Whitney’s cotton-gin trebled the value of the cotton-fields of the South. The mechanic who constructs a machine that will make ten or a hundred things in the time before required to make one thing is in the front rank of the civilizers of the human race.[27]

Inventors, not statesmen, rule the world through their machines, which augment the powers of man and sharpen his senses. Steam has made all civilized countries prosperous and great by vastly increasing man’s powers—by making him hundred-handed.[28]

In 1809 there was born to a distinguished baronet of Liverpool, England, a son. The boy was educated at Eton and Christ Church College, Oxford, graduating in 1831. In 1832 the young man entered parliament. In 1834 he took office under Sir Robert Peel. The name of the young man who commenced life under such auspicious circumstances was William Ewart Gladstone. For nearly half a century Mr. Gladstone was a prominent figure in English politics and administration. During that long period of time he was in the eye of the world, so to speak. He moulded the laws of an empire, repealed old statutes and made new statutes, largely influenced both the domestic and the foreign policy of a great nation, and exerted a considerable degree of control over the international affairs of the continent of Europe.

In 1813, four years after the birth of Mr. Gladstone, at Charlton, in Hertfordshire, England, Henry Bessemer was born. His father, Anthony Bessemer, had fled to England in 1792, a refugee from France. Henry Bessemer’s early training consisted of the rudiments of an ordinary education received in the parish school of the neighboring town of Hitchin. His father was a skilled mechanic and inventor, and Henry inherited the inventive faculty. He studied and practised the art of wood-turnery, producing, before arriving at the age of manhood, the most difficult patterns known to the art.

At the age of eighteen, in the year 1831—the year in which Mr. Gladstone completed his education—young Bessemer appeared in London, an obscure, unknown stranger. He, however, secured employment as a modeller and designer. His attention was soon directed to the imperfections of government stamps, in which there had been no improvement since the time of Queen Anne. He was informed by Sir Charles Persley, of the Stamp-office, that the frauds in stamps probably aggregated one hundred thousand pounds per annum. In the evenings of a few months he invented and made an improved stamp which obviated the objections to the one then in use. The invention was at once adopted by the Stamp-office, and in lieu of a stipulated sum in payment therefor, young Bessemer was asked “whether he would be satisfied with the position of superintendent of stamps, with five hundred or six hundred pounds per annum?” The suggested appointment he agreed to accept. Meantime, before the contemplated change occurred in the Stamp-office, the young inventor devised a further improvement in the new stamp, which not only made it much more perfect, but rendered it unnecessary for the government to employ a superintendent of stamps. In perfect good faith young Bessemer exhibited to the chief of the Stamp-office his new stamp, which was so palpably an improvement on the other that it was at once preferred and promptly adopted. What is more, the government not only declined to appoint the inventor to a place, but declined to give him a penny for his invention. This was in 1834, the year in which Mr. Gladstone began his long career as a representative of the British Crown. As young Mr. Gladstone entered the Treasury, its “junior lord,” young Mr. Bessemer retired from it an unsuccessful suitor for the just reward of genius and toil. He says, “Thus sad and dispirited, and with a burning sense of injustice overpowering all other feelings, I went my way from the Stamp-office, too proud to ask as a favor that which was indubitably my right.”[29]

From this point, both of time and event, there is a very wide divergence in the lives of these great men. The one is a man of ideas, the other a man of deeds. Mr. Gladstone thinks, talks, makes treaties and laws. He is constantly in the public eye, and his name ever on the public tongue. He is regarded as a great financier; he is certainly a great orator. He sways the multitude with his eloquence. He takes distinguished part in the wordy contests which occur every now and then in Parliament. These debates are much talked of. At the conclusion of one of them there is a vote of want of confidence, and Mr. Gladstone goes out of office and Mr. Disraeli comes in. At the conclusion of another of them there is a vote of want of confidence, and Mr. Disraeli goes out of office and Mr. Gladstone comes in. But whether Mr. Gladstone goes out and Mr. Disraeli comes in, or Mr. Disraeli goes out and Mr. Gladstone comes in, makes very little difference with the trade and commerce of the kingdom. The railway traffic continues in the one event or the other; the steamers continue to cross and recross the ocean; the “post” comes and goes; the electric current continues to act as messenger-boy; the telephone brings us face to face with our business correspondent or friend. There is, indeed, no reason why a vote of want of confidence in Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli should imply a want of confidence in steam or electricity, because neither Mr. Gladstone nor Mr. Disraeli ever had anything to do with the application of these great forces to the uses of man. They were entirely absorbed, the one in promoting the advancement of Liberalism, and the other in promoting the advancement of Toryism. And it is a curious fact, as showing the mutability of political opinion, that Mr. Disraeli entered public life as a Liberal, and subsequently became a great Tory leader; and Mr. Gladstone entered public life as a Tory, and subsequently became a great Liberal leader.

For twenty-two years after he retired empty-handed from the government Stamp-office Mr. Bessemer continued his career as an inventor and manufacturer, without, however, attracting any great share of public attention. But in 1856 he announced that he had made a discovery of vast importance in the process of steel making.[30] For a hundred years previously the Huntsman process had held the field. It yielded excellent steel but was very expensive. Mr. Bessemer announced that he could produce splendid cast-steel at about the cost of making iron! The announcement was received with much incredulity; but the “Bessemer converter” was exhibited, the new process shown, and the result seemed to confirm the verity of the claim of the inventor. Practical difficulties, however, postponed its complete success till 1860, when the new process supplanted all others.

Mr. Bessemer now stood at the head of the inventors of the world, and Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Palmerston, had come to be regarded as one of the most skilful governmental financiers in Europe, which meant that he was an adept in devising schemes of taxation calculated to yield the most revenue with the least popular discontent. When it is considered that it is necessary for the English Minister of Finance to draw from the British people more than a million dollars every morning of the year, including Sundays, before either the English lord or the English peasant can indulge in a free breakfast, the extreme delicacy of the duties devolving upon him will be understood and appreciated. If he proposes the repeal of the soap tax in order to extinguish the slave-trade, he must impose an additional penny in the pound on malt liquors in order to put an end to the vice of drunkenness. He is constantly between Scylla and Charybdis—in keeping off the one he is in danger of being swallowed up in the other. And if he can, at the end of the fiscal year, find a million dollars to apply to the liquidation of the public debt, he is extremely fortunate. From 1836, about the time Mr. Gladstone began his public career, down to 1877, the several chancellors of the English Exchequer, including Mr. Gladstone, contrived to save, in the aggregate, about twelve million pounds sterling for this purpose.

Let us recur a moment to the subject of the invention of Mr. Bessemer. It went into operation in 1860. The temptation to reproduce Mr. Bessemer’s own description of his process, which revolutionized the manufacture of steel, is irresistible. It is as follows:

“The converting vessel is mounted on an axis at or near its centre of gravity. It is constructed of boilerplates, and is lined either with fire-brick, road-drift, or gannister, which resists the heat better than any other material yet tried, and has also the advantage of cheapness. The vessel, having been heated, is brought into the requisite position to receive its charge of melted metal, without either of the tuyeres (or air-holes) being below the surface. No action can therefore take place until the vessel is turned up (so that the blast can enter through the tuyeres). The process is thus in an instant brought into full activity, and small though powerful jets of air spring upward through the fluid mass. The air, expanding in volume, divides itself into globules, or bursts violently upward, carrying with it some hundredweight of fluid metal, which again falls into the boiling mass below. Every part of the apparatus trembles under the violent agitation thus produced; a roaring flame rushes from the mouth of the vessel, and as the process advances it changes its violet color to orange, and finally to a voluminous pure white flame. The sparks, which at first were large, like those of ordinary foundery iron, change into small hissing points, and these gradually give way to soft floating specks of bluish light as the state of malleable iron is approached. There is no eruption of cinder as in the early experiments, although it is formed during the process; the improved shape of the converter causes it to be retained, and it not only acts beneficially on the metal, but it helps to confine the heat, which during the process has rapidly risen from the comparatively low temperature of melted pig-iron to one vastly greater than the highest known welding heats, by which malleable iron only becomes sufficiently soft to be shaped by the blows of the hammer; but here it becomes perfectly fluid, and even rises so much above the melting point as to admit of its being poured from the converter into a founder’s ladle, and from thence to be transferred to several successive moulds.”[31]

What is the value of this process? What is the extent of the service rendered by Mr. Bessemer to man? It is estimated that in the twenty-one years first elapsing after the successful working of the Bessemer process, the production of steel by it, notwithstanding its necessarily slow progress, amounted to twenty-five million tons. At $200 a ton, the alleged saving in cost as compared with the old process, this represents an aggregate saving of $5,000,000,000. In 1882 the world’s production was four million tons, which at the rate named yielded a saving of the enormous aggregate of $800,000,000 in a single year.[E7] These sums seem almost fabulous, especially so since they result from simply blowing air through crude melted iron for a quarter of an hour! But the radical character of the change wrought in the metal by the air-blowing process is shown by the fact that a steel rail is worth as much as twenty iron rails.[32]

All the governments of Europe honored Mr. Bessemer for his great invention, some by medals and orders of merit, and others by appropriating without compensation his process of steel-making. Of these latter Prussia stood in the front rank. England alone stood aloof. “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country and among his own kin.” From 1860 to 1872 England continued to load Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli with honors, but not until the latter year did the government recognize Mr. Bessemer, when the Prince of Wales presented him with the Albert gold medal, and in 1879 he was knighted by the Queen.

A comparison between the lives and services to man of two of the most distinguished statesmen of England, with the life and services, to man, of Sir Henry Bessemer, cannot fail to be of great value to every young man who possesses the power of just discrimination. But can just discrimination be expected of any young man entering upon the stage of active life when such discrimination is not possessed by the public at large? For example: The question being propounded, What is the value of the combined services to man of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, as compared with those of Sir Henry Bessemer? ninety-nine out of a hundred men of sound judgment would doubtless say, “The value of the services of the two statesmen is quite unimportant, while the value of the services of Mr. Bessemer is enormous, incalculable.” But how many of these ninety-nine men of sound judgment could resist the fascination of the applause accorded to the statesmen? How many of them would have the moral courage to educate their sons for the career of Mr. Bessemer instead of for the career of Mr. Disraeli or of Mr. Gladstone?* Not many in the present state of public sentiment. It will be a great day for man, the day that ushers in the dawn of more sober views of life, the day that inaugurates the era of the mastership of things in the place of the mastership of words.

Mr. Gladstone stands for politics and statesmanship at their best, and his career is the product of the old system of education at its best. Mr. Bessemer stands for science and art united, and his career is the product of the new education.