MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. 3; 



At the opening of the twentieth century we have far better occasion 

 than had at any time the great cynic, Carlyle, to exclaim: 



"The Present Time, youngest-bom of eternity, child and heir of all the Past 

 Times, with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a 'New Era' 

 to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance; however 

 commonplace it looks: to know it and what it bids us do is ever the sum of 

 knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its 

 heavenly omens — amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent 

 monitions; which, if we can not read and obey, it will not be well with us! . . 

 . . But, in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are arrested to 

 ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more im- 

 pressive days. . . . There must be a new world if there is to be any world 

 at all! . . . One thing I do know," he adds, . . . "That the few Wise 

 will have, by one method or another, to take command of the innumerable fool- 

 ish; that they must be got to take it; and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which 

 means also Valor and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and one 

 wise man is stronger than all unwise, they can be got." 



How shall the wise men and the wisest men accomplish their tasks? 

 I take it that Carlyle was also right when he prescribed the two great 

 tasks lying before us: 



"Huge-looming through the dim tumult of the always incommensurable Pres- 

 ent Time, outlines of two tasks disclose themselves: the grand Industrial of con- 

 quering some half or more of this Terraqueous Planet, for the use of man; then, 

 secondly, the grand constitutional task of sharing, in some pacific, endurable 

 manner, the fruit of said conquest and showing all people how it might be done." 



"Moreover," he goes on, "there are spiritual budding-times, and then also 

 there are physical appointed to Nations. 



"Thus, in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth Century, see once 

 more! Long Winter again past, the dead-seeming tree proves to be living, to have 

 been always living, after motionless times, every bough shoots forth, on the 

 sudden, very strangely — it now turns out that this favored England was not only 

 to have had her Shakespeares, Bacons, Sydneys, but to have had her Watts, Ark- 

 wrights, Brindleys ! We honor greatness in all kinds. . . . Prospero can send 

 his Fire-demons panting across all oceans; shooting with the speed of meteors, 

 on cunning highways, from end to end of all kingdoms; and make Iron his mis- 

 sionary, preaching its evangel to the brute Primeval Powers, which listen and 

 obey. . . . Advancing always, through all centuries, in the middle of the 

 eighteenth they arrived. The Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton-spinning, 

 cloth-dropping, iron-forging, steam-engining, railwaying, commercing and career- 

 ing towards all the winds of Heaven." 



Carlyle saw more clearly than perhaps any other man of his time 

 that, as others have since said, the world owes absolutely nothing, in its 

 conquest of the forces and powers of nature, to the kings and princes or 

 to the aristocracy of the worlds, past or present; they, with their battles 

 and contentions and their subordination to their own insignificant af- 

 fairs of every element of real progress, have been the great impediments 

 to progr.ess. The world owes all rather to the inventor, to the mechanic, 

 to the man of science and the man of mind. All progress has been 

 effected irrespective of, if not in spite of, the acts and famous deeds of 



