AT MA NCHES TER xlix 



some so abhorrent, to him of an interest so inexhaustible : in 

 which iron, water and fire are made to serve as slaves, now 

 with a tread more powerful than an elephant's, and now with 

 a touch more precise and dainty than a pianist's. The taste 

 for machinery was one that I could never share with him, and 

 he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I 

 had proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, 

 he looked at me askance : ' And the best of the joke,' said he, 

 4 is that he thinks himself quite a poet.' For to him the struggle 

 of the engineer against brute forces and with inert allies, was 

 nobly poetic. Habit never dulled in him the sense of the 

 greatness of the aims and obstacles of his profession. Habit 

 only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in triumphant 

 artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are taught to 

 speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave 

 and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great results 

 alone are admirable ; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in 

 particular, rather the infinite device and sleight of mind that 

 made them possible. 



A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as 

 Fairbairn's. a pupil would never be popular unless he drank 

 with the workmen and imitated them in speech and manner. 

 Fleeming, who would do none of these things, they accepted as 

 a friend and companion ; and this was the subject of remark in 

 Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till to-day. He 

 thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be brought in 

 a close relation with the working classes ; and for the skilled arti- 

 san he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues and 

 his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well 

 to regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, 

 on the other hand, broad distinctions ; and it was his profound 

 sense of the difference between one working man and another 

 that led him to devote so much time, in later days, to the 

 furtherance of technical education. In 1852 he had occasion to Experi- 

 see both men and masters at their worst, in the excitement of a ' 



strike ; and vefy foolishly (after their custom) both would seem to 

 have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on either 



