SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 315 



political results ! Herein, among other great events, we find the 

 origin of the American civil war ! 



In Europe, the social effect of the use of steam was strikingly 

 marked. Performing mechanical drudgery, it relieved vast numbers 

 of the laboring-class, and gave them time to think. It concentrated 

 them in factories and mills. Those industrial hives were pervaded by 

 literary influences, perhaps not always of a kind that we should ap- 

 prove of. They became the seats of agitation in politics and theology, 

 and, while this was the effect on the laboring mass, the owners or capi- 

 talists were accumulating enormous fortunes. 



We may excuse the enthusiastic literature of the cotton-manu- 

 facture its boasting, for men had accomplished works that were nearly 

 godlike. Mr. Baines, writing in 1833, states that " the length of cot- 

 ton-yarn spun in one year was nearly five thousand millions of miles 

 sufficient to pass round the earth's circumference more than two 

 hundred thousand times, sufficient to reach fifty-one times from the 

 earth to the sun. It would encircle the earth's orbit eight and a half 

 times. The wrought fabrics of cotton exported in one year would 

 form a girdle for the globe, passing eleven times round the equator, 

 and more than sufficient to form a continuous sheet from the earth to 

 the moon." And let us not forget that, to give commercial value to 

 this vast result, the capital chemical discovery of bleaching by chlo- 

 rine was essential. Such was the condition of things in England just 

 previously to the epoch in question. Necessarily, it was followed by 

 great social results. 



But there was something more. The locomotive absolutely revo- 

 lutionized society. A man could now travel farther in an hour than 

 he had previously done in a day. Again, it was clear that important 

 political results were occurring. The effect of the railroad was to 

 render nations more homogeneous, to destroy provincialism. It is 

 actually true that language underwent a change. No one who has 

 remarked the various dialects of the English counties prior to the 

 opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and the homogene- 

 ousness of speech which is fast displacing them, can be blind to this. 

 Simultaneously, a redistribution of the population took place. It was 

 largely withdrawn from the open country, and concentrated in the 

 towns. 



In this statement I am recalling facts so common that they are 

 familiar to us all. We all appreciate the immense social changes 

 that took place just before 1845. Who in those times could fail to 

 perceive that grand consequences must follow the expenditure of 

 thousands of millions of dollars in the building of railroads, who, 

 when he saw the labor of a year shrinking into the compass of a day, 

 the travel of a day into the compass of an hour, the thought of man 

 outstripping the velocity of light who could be so obtuse as not to 

 discern that a new agency had taken possession of the earth, that it 



