Were it necessary, and would space permit of it, we might extend this history further. We might cite the inventions of Huntsman, of Onions, of Cort, and Neilson, and show how each of these was conceived, was perfected, and was brought into practical use, whilst the nation as a whole remained inert, passive, and ignorant, and the experts of the trade were hostile, and sometimes equally ignorant. Huntsman perfected his process in a secrecy as carefully guarded as that of a mediæval necromancer hiding himself from the vigilance of the Church; whilst James Neilson, the inventor of the hot-blast, had at first to encounter the united ridicule and hostility of all the shrewdest and most experienced iron-masters in the kingdom. [Sidenote ◆1 The history of the cotton manufacture does so with equal force;] ◆¹ The history of the cotton manufacture offers precisely similar evidence. Almost every one of those great improvements made in it, by which Ability has multiplied the power of Labour, had to be forced by the able men on the acceptance of adverse contemporaries. Hay was driven from the country; Hargreaves from his native town; Arkwright’s mill, near Chorley, was burnt down by a mob; Peel, who used Arkwright’s machinery, was at one time in danger of his life. Nor was it only the hostility of the ignorant that the inventors had to encounter. They had to conquer Capital before they could conquer Labour; for the Capitalists at the beginning were hardly more friendly to them than the labourers. The first Capitalists who assisted Arkwright, and had Ability enough to discover some promise in his invention, had not enough Ability to see their way through certain difficulties, and withdrew their help from him at the most critical moment. The enterprising men who at last became his partners, and with the aid of whose Capital his invention became successful, represented their age just as little as Arkwright did. He and they, indeed, had the same opportunities as the society round them; but they stand contrasted to the society by the different use they made of them. [Sidenote ◆1 Also the history of the steam-engine, as a very curious anecdote will show.]