Nor was the complaint wholly unfounded.  But it was too late to recede.  The boys crowded to the classes; they read and worked with incredible eagerness; they thought that to be a man of books was better than to be a man with a saw and a plane.  Ambition seized them seized them by tens of thousands; they would rise.  Learning was their stepping-stone.  The recreative side of the Polytechnics was lost in the educational side.  Never before had there been such an ardour, such a thirst for knowledge; yet only for knowledge as a means to rise.  And there was but one outlet.  That, in the course of a few years, became congested.  Journalism, as the number of papers increased, demanded more workmen, and still more.  These young men from the Polytechnic filled up every vacancy.  They had seized upon this profession and made it their own; those who did not belong to them were gradually, but surely, ousted.  It was recognised that it was the profession of the young man who wanted to get on.  Some there were who affected to lament an alleged decay; the old scholarly style, they said, was gone; there was also gone the old reverence for authority, rank, and the established order.  Perhaps the journal, as the new men made it, was above all vigorous.  But it was true, which could not always be said of the papers before their time.  From their college—­the old Poly—­the young men carried away a love of truth and right dealing which, once imported into the newspaper press, made it an engine far more mighty—­an influence far more potent—­than ever it had been before.  There may have been some loss in style, though many of them wrote gracefully, and many showed on occasion a wonderful command of wit, sarcasm and satire.  But because the papers were always truthful the writers always knew what they wanted, and so their work had the strength of directness.

A few, but very few, continued at the work, whatever it might be, to which they had been apprenticed.  Then their lives were spent in a day of painful drudgery, followed by an evening of delightful study.  Very few heard of these men.  Now and then one would be discovered by a clergyman working in his parish; now and then one emerged from obscurity by means of a letter or a paper contributed to some journal.  Most of them lived and died unknown.

Yet there was one.  His case is remarkable because it first set rolling the ball of reform, He was by trade a metal turner and fitter; he had the reputation of being an unsociable man because he went home every day after work and stayed there; he was unmarried and lived alone in a small, four-roomed cottage near Kilburn, one of a collection of Workmen’s villages.  Here it was known that he had a room which he had furnished with a furnace, a table, shelves and bottles, and that he worked every evening at something.  One day there appeared in a scientific paper an article containing an account of certain discoveries of the greatest importance, signed by a name utterly unknown