It is in America, as was to be expected, that rise more quickly than in any other country.  Every one is ambitious, and there he realises the fact that no position is beyond his power if he will but work for it.  Franklin was a printer’s boy, General Putnam was a farmer, Roger Sherman was a shoemaker, and Andrew Jackson was a poor boy, who worked his way up from the humblest position; Patrick Henry, the great American orator², was a country tavern³-keeper; Abraham Lincoln was equally low placed in his start in life.  But even in America it is hard work to make a fortune.  Niorse, an American artist, but a better chemist and mechanician than a painter, thought out the magnetic telegraph on a Havre packet-ship, but met the common fate of inventors.  He struggled for years with poverty and a thousand difficulties.  He failed to interest capitalists.  At last, when he was yielding to despair, and meditated⁴ suicide, on the last night of a session of Congress, at midnight, when the Appropriation⁵ Bill was being rushed through, he got an appropriation of £6,000 for an experimental line between Washington and Baltimore; then success, rewards, honours, titles of nobility, gold medals, and an immense fortune.  The American inventor of the sewing machine had similar misfortune, and then as great a success.