◆¹ Let us take each case separately. Dudley’s life as an ironmaster was one long succession of persecution at the hands of his brothers in the trade. They petitioned the king to put a stop to his manufacture; they incited mobs to destroy his bellows and his furnaces; they harassed him with law-suits, ruined him with legal expenses; they succeeded at last in having him imprisoned for debt; and by thus crippling the inventor, they at last killed his invention. It is true that meanwhile a few men—a very few—believed in his ideas, and attempted to work them out independently; and amongst these was Oliver Cromwell himself. He and certain partners protected themselves with a patent for the purpose, and actually bought up the works of the ruined Dudley; but all their attempts ended in utter failure. Two more adventurers, named Copley and Proger, were successively granted patents during the reign of Charles II. for this same purpose, and likewise failed ignominiously. One man alone in the whole nation had proved himself capable of accomplishing this new conquest for industry; whilst the nation as a whole, and the masters of the iron trade in particular, remained as they were—stationary in their old invincible ignorance. The two Darbys, the two Craneges, and Reynolds, though not encountering, as Dudley did, the hostility of their contemporaries, yet achieved their work without the slightest encouragement or assistance from them. The younger Darby, solitary as Columbus on his quarter-deck, watched all night by his furnace as he was bringing his process to perfection. His workmen, like the sailors of Columbus, obeyed their orders blindly; and in hardly a brain but his own did there exist the smallest consciousness that one man was laying, in secret, the foundation of his country’s greatness. With regard to Reynolds and the Craneges, who imitated, though they did not perfect, the further use of coal for the production of iron that is malleable, we have similar evidence that is yet more circumstantial. Reynolds distinctly declares in a letter written to a friend that the conception of this process was so entirely original with the Craneges that it had never for a moment occurred to himself as being possible, and that they had had to convince him that it was so, against his own judgment. But when once his conversion was completed, he united his Ability with theirs; and within a very short time the second great step in our iron industry had been taken triumphantly by these three unaided men.