Being a burgess of the
town, he voted at the contested election at which General Burgoyne
was returned; but such was his poverty, and such the tattered state
of his dress, that a number of persons subscribed a sum sufficient
to have him put in a state fit to appear in the poll-room. The
exhibition of his machine in a town where so many workpeople lived
by the exercise of manual labour proved a dangerous experiment;
ominous growlings were heard outside the school-room from time to
time, and Arkwright,--remembering the fate of Kay, who was mobbed
and compelled to fly from Lancashire because of his invention of
the fly-shuttle, and of poor Hargreaves, whose spinning-jenny had
been pulled to pieces only a short time before by a Blackburn mob,-
-wisely determined on packing up his model and removing to a less
dangerous locality. He went accordingly to Nottingham, where he
applied to some of the local bankers for pecuniary assistance; and
the Messrs. Wright consented to advance him a sum of money on
condition of sharing in the profits of the invention. The machine,
however, not being perfected so soon as they had anticipated, the
bankers recommended Arkwright to apply to Messrs. Strutt and Need,
the former of whom was the ingenious inventor and patentee of the
stocking-frame.
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