ployers and employees and partners, but to a multitude of benign forces co-operating in his success.
Though he had, for example, but a few years of common schooling, he makes it beautifully clear that he received from various directions the incentives of an excellent education. He declares that he was fortunate in his ancestors and supremely fortunate in his birthplace. He is proud of a grandfather on one side who was familiarly known as "the professor," of a grandfather on the other side who was a friend of Cobbett, of an uncle who went to jail to vindicate the right of public assembly, of a father who was one of five weavers that founded the first library in Dunfermline, and of a mother capable of binding shoes to help support the family, in her morality an unconscious follower of Confucius, in her religion consciously a disciple of Channing. As for the town, it had the reputation of being the most radical in the kingdom: the stimulus of political and philosophic ideas was in the air; the editorials of the London Times were read from the pulpit; "the names of Hume, Cobden, and Bright were upon everyone's tongue." Dunfermline was radical, but with a radicalism nourished on history and inclined to hero-worship; for, in the midst of her, Abbey and ruined tower fired the young heart with remembrance of King Malcom and Wallace and Bruce. "It is a tower of strength for a boy," says the old man, "to have a hero." The thought of Wallace made him face whatever he was afraid
