heir 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 affecte