It has long seemed to the writer that the successful organizer of modern industry deserved a high place in public estimation. The qualities usually found in such a person constitute as rare a combination as can be found in any department of human activity. Those qualities are industry, probity, intelligence, judgment, and executive ability. These virtues will always be found to lie at the foundation of a well ordered and prosperous state. When to these are added enterprise and energy, there is little wanting either to the successful individual or to the growing community. It is to this class of men that New England owes much of its pre-eminence to-day. What the pioneer settlers did to smooth the path for their successors; what the forefathers of the Revolution contributed to establish a new government and place it upon a self-supporting basis,--the men who established the industrial enterprises of New England have done for their posterity and the perpetuity of republican institutions. If New England should be stripped to-morrow of her mills, shops, and foundries, and the wealth and institutions that they in turn have created, New England would be but little more than an obscure and unenterprising hill country, with a diminishing population and lessening influence. She would have a noble and inspiring history, but her glory would be departed. HON. CHARLES WILLIAMS, the subject of this sketch, belongs to the untitled American nobility of organizers of industry. He comes of an old industrial stock, and can trace his lineage back, through six generations of workers, to a stalwart ancestor in old Wales. The Williamses formed a large part of the population of Wales, "somewhat like the O's of Ireland and the Mac's of Scotland." It is an interesting fact that the ancestor of Oliver Cromwell, in the fourth remove, was a Williams, known as Morgan ap Williams, of Glamorganshire, Wales, a gentleman of property, who married a sister of Lord Thomas Cromwell, afterwards Earl of Essex. Carlyle speaks of the Protector as "Cromwell _alias_ Williams." The "Encyclopedia Americana" states positively that the genealogy of Cromwell is traced to Richard Williams, who assumed the name of Cromwell from his maternal uncle, Thomas Cromwell, secretary of state to Henry VIII.