In the year 1786 he was appointed high sheriff of Derbyshire, and when about that time the King narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of Margaret Nicholson, Arkwright, having presented an address of congratulation from his county to the King, received the honor of knighthood. He died on the 3d of August, 1792, at the age of sixty. The _Annual Register_ recording that event says not so much as a single word concerning Arkwright’s masterful genius which even then had set in motion a mighty social revolution. It mentions only the great fortune which he had acquired as a manufacturer of cotton yarn,—so difficult it is for the critic to place a true value on the life work of a contemporary. As you approach the City of the Dinner Pail from the west and gaze across the blue waters of the harbor, the eye rests upon the towering factories which line the opposite shore. Within those walls twenty-seven thousand men and women living in a degree of comfort never known before to the spinners and weavers of the world, earn their daily bread. Those towering factories are, every one, monuments to the genius of Richard Arkwright, the penny barber of Preston. If he appropriated the inventions of others, he perfected these inventions and made them of permanent value to mankind; and moreover, he arranged the machinery into series, organized the factory system, and revolutionized industry. Says Carlyle: “Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful man; no romance hero with haughty eyes, Apollo lip, and gesture like the herald Mercury; a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of copious free digestion;—a man stationed by the community to shave certain dusty beards in the northern parts of England at halfpenny each.... Nevertheless, in strapping razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the contradictions and confusions attendant thereon the man had notions in that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same, rather hopeless looking, which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not without great difficulty! his townsfolk rose in mob against him, for threatening to shorten labor, to shorten wages; so that he had to fly, with broken wash pots, scattered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay, his wife, too, rebelled; burned his wooden model of his spinning wheel; resolute that he should stick to his razors, rather;—for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand, packed her out of doors. Oh! reader, what a Historical Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, pot-bellied, much-enduring, much-inventing barber! French revolutions were a-brewing, to resist the same in any measure, Imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England; and it was this man who gave to England the power of cotton.” III MECHANICAL INVENTIONS