of the Reform Bill.

The mill, too, did much to educate him. In the Rochdale factory there
was no marked separation as at Manchester between rich and poor. Master
and men lived side by side, knew one another's family history and
fortunes, and fraternized over their joys and sorrows. Even in those
days of backward education 'Old Jacob' made himself responsible for the
schooling of his workmen's children; his son, too, made personal friends
among those working under him and kept them throughout his life. Outside
the mill Rochdale offered opportunities which he readily took. In 1833
he became one of the founders and first president of a debating society,
and he began early to address Bible meetings and to lecture on
temperance in his native town, moved by no conscious idea of learning to
speak in public, but by the simple desire to be useful in good work. In
such holidays as he took he was eager to travel abroad and to learn more
of the outside world, and before he started at the age of twenty-four on
his longest travels (a nine months' journey to Palestine and the eastern
Mediterranean) he had, by individual effort, fitted himself to hold his
own with the best students of the universities in width of outlook and
capacity for mastering a subject. Like them, he had his limitations and
his prejudices; but however we may admire wide toleration in itself,
depth and intensity of feeling are often of more value to a man in
enabling him to influence his fellows.

The year of Queen Victoria's accession may be counted a landmark in the
life of this great Victorian. Then for the first time he met Richard
Cobden, who was destined to extend his labours and to share his glory;
and in the following year he began to co-operate actively in the Free
Trade cause, attending meetings in the Rochdale district and gradually
developing his power of speaking. It was about this time that he came to
know his first wife, Elizabeth Priestman, of the Society of Friends, in
Newcastle-on-Tyne, a woman of refined nature and rare gifts, whom he was
to marry in 1839 and to lose in 1841. Then it was that he built the
house 'One Ash', facing the same common as the house in which he was
born. Here he lived many years, and here he died in the fullness of
time, a Lancashire man, content to dwell among his own people, in his
native town, and to forgo the grandeur of a country house. It was from
here that he was called in the decisive hour of his life to take par