t interference was simply a hindrance. The progress of
improvement, says Adam Smith, depends upon 'the uniform, constant, and
uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition,' which often
succeeds in spite of the errors of government, as nature often overcomes
the blunders of doctors. It is, as he infers, 'the highest impertinence
and presumption for kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the
economy of private people' by sumptuary laws and taxes upon imports.[31]
To the English manufacturer or engineer government appeared as a
necessary evil. It allowed the engineer to make roads and canals, after
a troublesome and expensive process of application. 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 process 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 t