Life of Count Rumford. 185 



them. He was to change all their habits of life. He 

 was to bring under rules of cleanliness, thrift, and 

 order the most unpromising subjects of such dis- 

 cipline. Yet he accomplished all he undertook, and he 

 did it with signal success. All through his life and in 

 all his private and public relations Order was with 

 him almost a deified principle. He carried order into 

 everything. He exacted order of everybody. He did 

 make his pauper asylum a workhouse of remunerative 

 industry, the inmates of which were really happy. 

 For a series of years the institution was so successful 

 that besides producing all the clothing needed for the 

 Bavarian troops a large supply from it was sold to the 

 public, and even to other countries. At one period 

 there accrued from it to the Electorate a profit of ten 

 thousand florins in a year. Though at first some of 

 the inmates felt the constraint and restlessness of their 

 new condition, there never was any mutinous conduct 

 among them. Cheap materials which they could not 

 waste hemp, flax, and wool first engaged their un- 

 skilled hands. A system almost like mechanism was 

 introduced into all the details of the establishment. 

 True to his leading aim of economy, Thompson con- 

 structed and arranged the kitchen, which daily pro- 

 vided a warm and nutritive dinner for from a thou- 

 sand to fifteen hundred persons. So highly did Sir 

 Benjamin pride himself on this special accomplish- 

 ment of his, which he brought to bear in sundry cu- 

 linary feats in many southern cities of the Continent, 

 and in Great Britain and Ireland, that he procured 

 certificates from great functionaries testifying to the 

 incredibly small amount of fuel used in his apparatus. 

 Four and a half pennies' worth of fuel cooked a dinner 



