He met all difficulties alike with patience and with a steadfast purpose to overcome them. He had two special ones. His workmen--often lazy, indolent, drunken--were a trouble to him, as were also the furnaces, where the heat had to be of a certain degree to fire his ware, and where sometimes the work and labour of months would be destroyed in a few hours. By patience he won the hearts of the first, and they came to trust him, and by patience, too, he gradually righted the second. He pulled down and he built up till the kilns were right. "It must be done," he used to say of any difficult enterprise, "let what may stand in the way." He had great ambition for his beloved calling. He wanted to make it an art. England had been long famed for cheapness but not for beauty, and so he set himself to study the designs of the ancients and of the Greeks, copying them on china and porcelain. And yet it seemed that even as he took step after step there were ever on each round of the ladder new difficulties. There was a long-standing one--the wretched state of the roads in Staffordshire, and the difficulty of getting the ware carried to other places for sale, and of getting necessaries for the work brought into the county. The backs of horses and donkeys, these were the only mode of conveyance--miserable underfed creatures that tottered and stumbled along and not seldom stuck in the muddy lanes or fell in the ruts and rugged roads, and often broke their legs and their wares, and had to be shot where they lay--a happy release for the poor animals. Josiah saw all this, and realised that something must be done to remedy the evil. So in the midst of his watchful care and constant thought for his beloved potteries he made time to push the grand scheme of a canal that began gradually to see daylight. It was not pack-horses that would labour slowly to Birmingham and Sheffield, but a broad waterway to carry goods to Liverpool and other seaports. This was what his native county wanted. And so he subscribed largely to this, and helped to push a Bill through Parliament. "I scarcely know," he wrote, "whether I am a landed gentleman, an engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other characters by turns." In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of the Tiber in Italy. By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with thousands of flourishing houses and workmen. And he himself was the mainspring of it all--the moving spirit.