(Page 23 of 26)

As Americans we are justly proud that we have no hereditary titles, but each man is measured by his own personal worth.

While believing firmly in the propriety of this order of things, yet we would not have you imagine that we underestimate the value of a respectable lineage, but it is better to be the originator of a great family than to be the degenerate descendant of one.

With but few exceptions those Americans whose lives are very properly held up as an example for the imitation of our youth, are men who have had to work their own way from the humble walks in life, to the highest in the gift of the nation.

This is true of Franklin, the statesman and philosopher, as it is of Lincoln, the patriot and martyr, and the splendid list of names that adorn the pages of our intervening history.

Smiles in his "Self-Help" shows how in England, a land where ancestry counts for so much, the descendants of the greatest men, even of kings, have been found in the humble of callings.

The blood of all men flows from equally remote sources; and though some are unable to trace their line directly beyond their grandfathers, all are nevertheless justified in placing at the head of their pedigree the great progenitors of the race, as Lord Chesterfield did when he wrote, "ADAM de Stanhope - EVE de Stanhope." No class is ever long stationary. The mighty fall, and the humble are exalted. New families take the place of the old, who disappear among the ranks of the common people. Burke's "Vicissitudes of Families" strikingly exhibits the rise and fall of families, and shows that the misfortunes which overtake the rich and noble are greater in proportion than those which overwhelm the poor. This author points out that of the twenty-five barons selected to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, there is not now in the House of Peers a single male descendant. Civil wars and rebellions ruined many of the old nobility and dispersed their families.

Yet their descendants in many cases survive, and are to be found among the ranks of the people. Fuller wrote in his "Worthies," that "some who justly hold the surnames of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets, are hid in the heap of common men.. Therefore Burke shows that two of the lineal descendants of the Earl of Kent, sixth son of Edward I, were discovered in a butcher and a toll-gatherer; that the great-grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter of the Duke of Clarence, sank to the condition of a cobbler at Newport, in Shropshire; and that among the lineal descendants of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III, was the late sexton of St. George's Church, London. It is understood that the lineal descendant of Simon de Montfort, England's premier baron, is a saddler in Tooley street. One of the descendants of the "Proud Percys," a claimant of the title of Duke of Northumberland, was a Dublin trunkmaker; and not many years since one of the claimants for the title of Earl of Perth presented himself in the person of a laborer in a Northumberland coal-pit.

Hugh Miller, when working as a stone-mason near Edinburgh, was served by a hodman, who was one of the numerous claimants for the earldom of Crauford - all that was wanted to establish his claim being a missing marriage certificate; and while the work was going on, the cry resounded from the walls many times in the day, of "John, Yearl Crauford, bring us another hod o' lime." One of Oliver Cromwell's great-grandsons was a grocer in London, and others of his descendants died in great poverty. Many barons of proud names and titles have perished, like the sloth, upon their family tree, after eating up all the leaves; while others have been overtaken by adversities which they have been unable to retrieve, and have sunk at last into poverty and obscurity. Such are the mutability of rank and fortune.

The great bulk of the English peerage is comparatively modern, so far as the titles go; but it is not the less noble that it has been recruited to so large an extent from the ranks of honorable industry. In olden times, the wealth and commerce of London, conducted as it was by energetic and enterprising men, was a prolific source of peerages. therefore, the earldom of Cornwallis was founded by Thomas Cornwallis, the Cheapside merchant; that of Essex by William Capel, the draper; and that of Craven by William Craven, the merchant tailor. The modern Earl of Warwick is not descended from the "King- maker," but from William Greville, the wool-stapler; while the modern dukes of Northumberland find their head, not in the Percys, but in Hugh Smithson, a respectable London apothecary.

The founders of the families of Dartmouth, Radnor, Ducie, and Pomfret, were respectively a skinner, a silk manufacturer, a merchant tailor, and a Calais merchant; while the founders of the peerages of Tankerville, Dormer, and Coventry, were mercers. The ancestors of Earl Romney, and Lord Dudley and Ward, were goldsmiths and jewelers; and Lord Dacres was a banker in the reign of Charles I, as Lord Overstone is in that of Queen Victoria. Edward Osborne, the founder of the dukedom of Leeds, was apprentice to William Hewet, a rich cloth-worker on London Bridge, whose only daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by leaping into the Thames after her, and whom he eventually married.

William Phipps, at one time Colonial Governor of Massachusetts, and the founder of the Normandy family, was the son of a gunsmith who emigrated to Maine, where this remarkable man was born in 1651. He was one of a family of not fewer than twenty-six children (of whom twenty-one were sons), whose only fortune lay in their stout hearts and strong arms. William seems to have had a sash of the Danish sea blood in his veins, and he did not take kindly to the quiet life of a shepherd in which he spent his early years.

By nature bold and adventurous, he longed to become a sailor and roam through the world. He sought to join some ship; but not being able to find one, he apprenticed himself to a ship-builder, with whom he thoroughly learned his trade, acquiring the arts of reading and writing during his leisure hours. Having completed his apprenticeship and removed to Boston, he wooed and married a widow of some means, after which he set up a little ship-building yard of his own, built a ship, and putting to sea in her, he engaged in the lumber trade, which he carried on in a plodding and laborious way for the space of about ten years.

Published by the Christian Herald, Louis Klopsch, Proprietor, Bible House, New York.
Copyright 1895 by Louis Klopsch.

Tags: Success