While managing the Gas-works, one of Mr. Neilson's labours of love was the establishment and direction by him of a Workmen's Institution for mutual improvement. Having been a workman himself, and experienced the disadvantages of an imperfect education in early life, as well as the benefits arising from improved culture in later years, he desired to impart some of these advantages to the workmen in his employment, who consisted chiefly of persons from remote parts of the Highlands or from Ireland. Most of them could not even read, and his principal difficulty consisted in persuading them that it was of any use to learn. For some time they resisted his persuasions to form a Workmen's Institution, with a view to the establishment of a library, classes, and lectures, urging as a sufficient plea for not joining it, that they could not read, and that books would be of no use to them. At last Mr. Neilson succeeded, though with considerable difficulty, in inducing fourteen of the workmen to adopt his plan. Each member was to contribute a small sum monthly, to be laid out in books, the Gas Company providing the members with a comfortable room in which they might meet to read and converse in the evenings instead of going to the alehouse. The members were afterwards allowed to take the books home to read, and the room was used for the purpose of conversation on the subjects of the books read by them, and occasionally for lectures delivered by the members themselves on geography, arithmetic, chemistry, and mechanics. Their numbers increased so that the room in which they met became insufficient for their accommodation, when the Gas Company provided them with a new and larger place of meeting, together with a laboratory and workshop. In the former they studied practical chemistry, and in the latter they studied practical mechanics, making for themselves an air pump and an electrifying machine, as well as preparing the various models used in the course of the lectures. The effects on the workmen were eminently beneficial, and the institution came to be cited as among the most valuable of its kind in the kingdom.[1] Mr. Neilson throughout watched carefully over its working, and exerted himself in all ways to promote its usefulness, in which he had the zealous co-operation of the leading workmen themselves, and the gratitude of all. On the opening of the new and enlarged rooms in 1825, we find him delivering an admirable address, which was thought worthy of republication, together with the reply of George Sutherland, one of the workmen, in which Mr. Neilson's exertions as its founder and chief supporter were gratefully and forcibly expressed.[2]