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the stream like the young niggers to sink or swim, and I have had to struggle since for my very existence. My parents being unable to support me, I was taken from school when about eight years of age, and sent to earn my livelihood as a weaver’s drawboy. At that occupation I remained several years; and during that period my ardent genius was cramped as much as ever an Apothecary’s apprentice was over his pestle and mortar. As I could not, while pent up in a weaver’s shop, get proper scope for the expansion of my intellectual faculties in a literary way, I turned my attention to politics. There’s no place like a weaver’s shop for studying politics. In 1830, I took a deep interest in the question of Parliamentary Reform, then agitating the country. I attended the great Reform demonstrations at Renfrew, when the cry was “the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill.” There can be no doubt that my moral aid and influence very much assisted Lord John Russell in passing the Reform Bill, which secured our constitutional liberties. The young men of the present generation can have no idea of the difficulties which we had to contend with at that time to secure for them these liberties. I certainly expected that for such political services I would have been rewarded by my political party with a Government appointment, but I was doomed to disappointment, as many others before me have been. The day will come, however, it is already “looming
