THE PRACTICAL MAN AS AN OBSTRUCTIVE. 39 



you can inform him of something connected with his business that he 

 did not know. It may he said that employers and the heads of manu- 

 factories are, as a rule, in these days, educated gentlemen, and that 

 therefore it is wrong to impute to them the narrow-mindedness of the 

 practical man. I agree that in numerous instances this would he 

 wrong ; but the fact is that, in many cases I think I may say in most 

 cases the head of the establishment, the moneyed man, the man who, 

 by his commercial ability (that most necessary element in all estab- 

 lishments), keeps the concern going by finding lucrative orders, is not 

 intimately acquainted with the practice of the business carried on by 

 his firm ; he relies upon some manager or foreman, who, too commonly, 

 is not the real, but the so-called practical man. It is such men as 

 those who simply practise that which they have seen, without know- 

 ing why they practise it. To them the title of practical man has most 

 improperly been attributed, and it is on the advice of such men that 

 the true heads of the firm too commonly regulate their conduct as to 

 the management of their business, and as to the necessary changes to 

 be made in the way of improvement. 



As I have said, the practical man derides those who bring forward 

 new inventions, and calls them schemers. No doubt, whatever they 

 do scheme and well it is for the country that there are men who do 

 so it also may be true that the majority of schemes prove abortive ; 

 but it must be recollected that the whole progress of art and manufac- 

 ture has depended and will depend upon successful discoveries which, 

 in their inception, were and will be schemes just as much as were those 

 discoveries that have been and will be unfruitful ; but the successful 

 discoveries, because they are successful, are taken out of the category 

 of schemes when years of untiring application on the part of the invent- 

 ors have, so to speak, thrust them down the throat of the unwilling 

 practical man. Take the instance of Mr. Bessemer, who was beset for 

 years by difficulties of detail in his great scheme of improvement in the 

 manufacture of steel. As long as he was so beset the practical men 

 chorused, " He is a schemer ; he is one of the schemers ; it is a 

 scheme." Supposing that these practical difficulties had beaten Mr. 

 Bessemer, and that they had not been overcome to this day ? The 

 practical man would have derided him still as a schemer, although the 

 theory and groundwork of his invention would have been as true un- 

 der these circumstances as it now is. Fortunately for the world, and 

 happily for him, he was able to overcome these most vexatious hin- 

 drances and make his invention that which it is. No one now dares 

 apply the term " schemer " to Mr. Bessemer, or " scheme " to his in- 

 vention, but it is as true now that he is a " schemer " and his inven- 

 tion a " scheme " as it would have been had he failed up to the present 

 to conquer the minor difficulties. It is a species of profanation to sug- 

 gest, but I must suggest it, for it is true, that Watt, Stephenson, Fara- 

 day, and almost every other name among the honored dead to whose 



