AN UNPAID SERVANT OF THE
STATE.

THE public is just now suffering the
inconveniences connected with a change of
servants. Every housekeeper knows what that
is; and so does every politician. The servants
of the public have a great deal of work to do,
and many little hopes and little interests
depend on their attention. When there is a
change made in the tenants of the offices
at Downing Street, not only do many prominent
and much-discussed intentions perish
unfulfilled, but many quiet plans and promises
for evil or for good, of which the world hears
little, take a blight at the same time. It concerns
us now to speak of one of these.

The public must be well aware that it has
servants out of Downing Street; and one such
servant, who has for years been working quite
as hard as any placeman, for the public good,
without either asking or expecting any payment,
has, by disinterested labour, broken
down his health. He is a poor man, who,
after twelve hours of daily labour for his own
support, has for the last fourteen years given
to his country daily—in an unpretending
way—as much time as is usually included in
the hours of business at a public office. The
wild man, who has been so foolish as to do all
this without a penny of remuneration, and
who, more foolishly still than this, has spent
upon the public all that could be wrung out
of his earnings as a weekly labourer—who
has produced, in his quiet, silly way, results
that will hand his name down as a tender
recollection to our children's children—is Mr.
Thomas Wright of Manchester.

"We never heard of Mr.Thomas Wright of
Manchester," some of our children possibly
may say.

Children, as yet the world, sometimes, does
not talk most about its best inhabitants!
Perhaps you may grow old, in a day when
Thomas Wrights will receive public honour;
although they do not court it, and when
Lord Tomnoddies will take to modesty as the
most popular, way to place and pension.
But now, in our day, to return to the point
from which we set out, namely, the falling of
small things with great, of worms with
mountains; while the propriety of giving a scanty
return—pension they call it—for his public
services, to Mr. Wright, was being recognised
by Government, the Government fell down,
and it remains to be seen what may be done
by those who are perhaps destined to come
(like Jill) tumbling after.

Who is Mr. Wright? The fathers probably
have heard his name; if so, let us
instruct our children of his doings. Thomas
Wright, of Manchester, is a worn but not a
weary man of sixty-three, who has for
forty-seven years been weekly servant in a large
iron foundry, of which he is now the foreman.
His daily work begins at five o'clock in the
morning, and closes at six in the evening; for
forty-seven years he has worked through
twelve hours daily, to support himself and
those depending on him. Those depending
on him are not few; he has had nineteen
children; and, at some periods there have been
grandchildren looking to him for bread. His
income never has attained two hundred
pounds a-year. This is a life of toil. Exeter
Hall might plead for him as a man taxed
beyond the standard limit; but he had bread
to earn, and knew that he had need to work
for it: he did work with great zeal and great
efficiency, obtaining very high respect and
confidence from his employers. A man so
labouring, and leading in his home an
exemplary, pious life, might be entitled to go to bed
betimes, and rest in peace between these days
of industry and natural fatigue. What could a
man do, in the little leisure left by so much
unremitting work? Poor as he was—toiling
as he did, a modest man of humble origin,
with no power in the world to aid him but
the wonderful spiritual power of an earnest
will—Thomas Wright has found means, in his
little intervals of leisure, to lead back, with
a gentle hand, three hundred convicted
criminals to virtue; to wipe the blot from their
names and the blight from their prospects;
to place them in honest homes, supported by
an honest livelihood.

Fourteen years ago Mr. Wright visited,
one Sunday, the New Bailey Prison, at
Manchester, and took an earnest interest in what
he saw. He knew that, with the stain of
gaol upon them, the unhappy prisoners, after
release, would seek in vain for occupation;
and that society would shut the door of
reformation on them, and compel them, if they
would not starve, to walk on in the ways