Captains of Industry | Page 7

collector of facts
concerning the condition of workingmen everywhere, and for many
years cherished a project of making his own business a coöperative
one.
"He believed," remarks Mr. Cheever, "that the skilled and faithful
manual worker, as well as the employer, was entitled to a participation

in the net proceeds of business, over and above his actual wages. He
held that in this country the entire people are one great working class,
working with brains, or hands, or both, who should therefore act in
harmony--the brain-workers and the hand-workers--for the equal rights
of all, without distinction of color, condition, or religion. Holding that
capital is accumulated labor, and wealth the creation of capital and
labor combined, he thought it to be the wise policy of the large
capitalists and corporations to help in the process of elevating and
advancing labor by a proffered interest."
These were the opinions of a man who had had long experience in all
the grades, from half-frozen apprentice to millionaire manufacturer.
He died in 1868, aged seventy-one years, leaving an immense estate;
which, however, chiefly consisted in his wire-manufactory. He had
made it a principle not to accumulate money for the sake of money, and
he gave away in his lifetime a large portion of his revenue every year.
He bequeathed to charitable associations the sum of four hundred and
twenty-four thousand dollars, which was distributed among twenty-one
objects. His great bequests were to institutions of practical and homely
benevolence: to the Home for Aged Women and Widows, one hundred
thousand dollars; to found a hospital and free dispensary, the same
amount; smaller sums to industrial schools and mission schools.
It was one of his fixed convictions that boys cannot be properly fitted
for life without being both taught and required to use their hands, as
well as their heads, and it was long his intention to found some kind of
industrial college. Finding that something of the kind was already in
existence at Worcester, he made a bequest to it of one hundred and ten
thousand dollars. The institution is called the Worcester County Free
Institute of Industrial Science.

ELIHU BURRITT,
THE LEARNED BLACKSMITH.

Elihu Burritt, with whom we have all been familiar for many years as
the Learned Blacksmith, was born in 1810 at the beautiful town of New
Britain, in Connecticut, about ten miles from Hartford. He was the
youngest son in an old-fashioned family of ten children. His father
owned and cultivated a small farm; but spent the winters at the
shoemaker's bench, according to the rational custom of Connecticut in
that day. When Elihu was sixteen years of age, his father died and the
lad soon after apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in his native village.
He was an ardent reader of books from childhood up; and he was
enabled to gratify this taste by means of a small village library, which
contained several books of history, of which he was naturally fond.
This boy, however, was a shy, devoted student, brave to maintain what
he thought right, but so bashful that he was known to hide in the cellar
when his parents were going to have company.
As his father's long sickness had kept him out of school for some time,
he was the more earnest to learn during his apprenticeship; particularly
mathematics, since he desired to become, among other things, a good
surveyor. He was obliged to work from ten to twelve hours a day at the
forge; but while he was blowing the bellows he employed his mind in
doing sums in his head. His biographer gives a specimen of these
calculations which he wrought out without making a single figure:--
"How many yards of cloth, three feet in width, cut into strips an inch
wide, and allowing half an inch at each end for the lap, would it require
to reach from the centre of the earth to the surface, and how much
would it all cost at a shilling a yard?"
He would go home at night with several of these sums done in his head,
and report the results to an elder brother who had worked his way
through Williams College. His brother would perform the calculations
upon a slate, and usually found his answers correct.
When he was about half through his apprenticeship he suddenly took it
into his head to learn Latin, and began at once through the assistance of
the same elder brother. In the evenings of one winter he read the Æneid
of Virgil; and, after going on for a while with Cicero and a few other

Latin authors, he began Greek. During the winter months he was
obliged to spend every hour of daylight at the forge, and even in the
summer his leisure minutes were few and far between. But