"Never mind," he said, "I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave you all yet."
He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was wanted.
Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England. People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or that--a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle--one of these may have belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins--a hard and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too, was the strong mind that trained men and boys--never before used to machinery--to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the stupidity of workmen had sometimes almost daunted him, but these days were past.
And how the man worked!--with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his "penny a shave," striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches from his machines--and even more from his mills--flowed in upon him. He was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land. King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending his mills and his machinery--leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim to bodily suffering--subject to severe asthma--and how bravely and uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now, already early--while he was but in his sixtieth year--he began to fail. Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed away on the 3rd August, 1792.