Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/156

, was the first to welcome Mr. Mundella to St Stephen's on his return for Sheffield in 18G8, In his eighteenth year his apprenticeship was at an end. He had mastered his trade thoroughly, and contemporaneously he had learned all that could be acquired at the Mechanics' Institute of the town, and a great deal more. He was an indefatigable reader. In his nineteenth 3^ear, so conspicuous was his business capacity', that he was engaged as manager of a large enterprise in the cotton trade. At twenty- three he removed to Nottingham, to become junior partner in a firm which shortly transacted the largest hosiery business in the Midlands,—Hone, Mundella, & Co.,—employing as many as three thousand "hands." Of this flourishing company Mr. Mundella is still a director, though not interfering very actively with the management. He is, moreover, chairman of the Commercial Union Insurance Company, and is a director of the National Bank and of the Bank of New Zealand.

To very few "printers' devils" or "stockingers" is it given thus to have a finger in the grande commerce of the country; but Mr. Mundella climbed the ladder steadily and skilfully, and it cannot be said of him that when he got to the summnit he forgot the condition of the less fortunate toilers whom he left below. On the contrary, no working-man in England has striven more earnestly or intelligently for the elevation of the mass than the member from Sheffield, as a bare enumeration of his political and legislative res gestæ will readily show.

Always precocious, Mundella's political career began in mere boyhood. The Austrian tyranny, which had driven his father from his native land, and the miserable