Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/37



OT only the moral and material worlds but their prime forces run parallel to each other. What the power of public opinion is in the one, the power of steam is in the other. We have noticed how public opinion was first "improved," applied and utilized in Birmingham. What it did to and through this force for the moral world, it did to and through steam for the world of matter and mechanics. James Watt came here with the alphabet and a few short syllables of the mighty science he founded. He came with a nervous, sensitive, impulsive mind, jaded with the long wrestle and grapple with conceptions half hidden and half revealed in various experiments of varying success. He had encountered much of that souring and fretting experience through which all the pioneers of invention have passed to their fame or failure. Like them he had