he went onward with his silk machine.  As he himself said, at a recent meeting at Bradford,[1]—­“They might judge how hard he had worked to conquer the difficulties which beset him, when he told them that for twenty years he had never been in bed at half-past five in the morning; in fact, he did not think there was a man in England who had worked harder than he had.”  The most remarkable thing was, that he threw away an immense fortune before there was any probability of his succeeding.  “He had almost brought himself to ruin, for he was L360,000 out of pocket before he even made a shilling by his machine; indeed, he wrote off a quarter of a million as entirely lost, before he began to make up his books again.  Since then, his patent for the manufacture of silk had turned out one of the most successful of the day.”

[Footnote 1:  The meeting was held to receive the transfer of Mr. Lister’s fine Park at Manningham, which he had presented to the Corporation of Bradford, “to be a People’s Park for ever.”]

In the Park presented by Mr. Lister to the people of Bradford, a statue was recently erected by public subscription.  It was unveiled by the Right Hon. W.E.  Forster, who, in closing his speech, observed:  “I doubt, after all, whether we are come here to do honour to Mr. Lister, so much as to do honour to ourselves.  We wish to do honour to those working faculties which have made our country of England a practical, and therefore a great and prosperous, and a powerful country.  It is this untiring, unresting industry which Mr. Lister possesses, this practical understanding, this determination to carry out any object which he is convinced ought to be carried out, and his determination to fear no opposition and to care for no obstacle—­it is these practical faculties that have made England what she is.  What is it especially that we are honouring?  It is the pluck which this man has shown; it is the feeling that, having to do with the worsted trade, he said to himself, ’Here is something which ought to be done; I will not rest until I have found out how it can be done; and having found out how it can be done, where is the man who shall stop my doing it?’ Now it was upon that principle that he fought his long struggle; and so when we read the story of his struggles, ever since 1842, in those two great inventions, we raise this statue to the man who has successfully fought the battle, and hope that our sons and the sons of all, rich and poor together, will come in after-days to admire it, not merely because it gives them the form and features of a rich and successful man, but because it gives them the form and features of a man who was endowed with industry, with intellect, with energy, with courage, with perseverance,—­who spared himself no pains in first ascertaining the conditions of the problems he had to solve,—­and then whose heart never fainted, whose will never relaxed, in determining to carry out those conditions.”