To Place, the experience of social reformers was as valuable as that of politicians. Social life gives its character to public life, and the politician is most to be valued whose measures tend to exalt the daily life of the people. Near the end of his days Place addressed the following (his last) letter to Robert Owen, with whom he had been acquainted since 1813:--
"Dear Owen,--It is some years since you and I had a conversation, and it is time we had one. Will you call upon me, or shall I call upon you? I go out but little, having an asthmatic complaint, which at times treats me sadly, and from which I am never wholly free. Worst of all, I have an affection of the brain, which will not permit me either to read or write, and when these two complaints co-operate I am something worse than good for nothing. You are, I conclude, in a much better state than I am, although you are not much younger, yet the doctors tell me that after having lived through seventy years without illness, I have nothing to complain of in the usual circumstances of old age now that I approximate to eighty.--
From a condition of absolute penuriousness, he raised himself to the position of master tailor, from which, at the age of forty-five, he was able to retire upon an income of £1,1000. Shrewd, hard-headed, painstaking, vigilant and prudent as he was, he found, when more than sixty, that £650 of his income was irrevocably lost He had put a large part of his capital into house property, and left the investment of it to an incompetent or dishonest solicitor.* The fate befel him which afterwards befel Cobden, Thomas Bayley Potter, and some others.
Why did Place let his prudence sleep? Why, in his walks with Jeremy Bentham,** did he not turn his steps to the sites of his investments, and judge for himself their value? His absorbed interest in public affairs is the only explanation. Yet he had often warned others that such engrossment, however honourable, should be limited, and not suffered to endanger necessary personal security.
On the death of Place in 1854, at the age of eighty-two, the _Spectator_ and the _Reasoner_ expressed a hope that a life of Place would be written as one of supreme utility to the great class which he had served so conspicuously.