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It is not strange that the free intellect of the happily born should have luxu- 

 riated in the attractive lield of the liberal sciences, guiltless of any intended 

 bearings on the useful or the practical; that geometry and astronomy had 

 their votaries; that music, statuary and painting had their triumphs; that a 

 literature should have sprung into being, recording the utterings of the genius 

 of history; the inspirations of the poetic muse; and the profounder, though 

 scarcely less imaginative speculations, of a metaphysical philosophy. 



It is not strange that eloquence should have poured its full tide from the 

 Bema and the Rostrum — or that " the pride, the pomp and circumstance of glo- 

 rious war," should have fired many a gifted mind with the strange ambition, to 

 swell the catalogue of those who have lived only to desolate and to destroy. 



But while the liberal arts were thus expanding into being through the irre- 

 pressible energy of the free and the governing mind, unencumbered, as it was, 

 by the burden of productive toil ; the Useful Arts, inspired by no such living 

 energy, abandoned to the practice of those whose adequate qualification was 

 deemed to be the strong ann, the bowed and submissive spirit, and the mifur- 

 nished head, were destined to no corresponding development. 



Roman history hands down to us, indeed, one Cincinnatus, who soiled his 

 patrician fingers with the touch of the plough — but, though careful to record 

 his military glories, fails to inform us that Agriculture was at all benefited by 

 the contact. In the light of the present age, I am afraid we must set down the 

 fabled Triptolemus as a very poor farmer; the Cyclops as indift'erent black- 

 smiths ; and even D.-edalus himself, not very much of a mechanic. 



Under such conditions of the social system, political and economical, was 

 constructed that high wall and deep ditch, which for long centuries of duration, 

 and through various phases of society, continued to separate, broadly and invi- 

 diously, the Liberal from the Useful Aits — and I need not *add that the traces 

 of this discrimination are not yet obliterated. There lingers in our midst even 

 yet, such a thing as professional pride ; as traditional disdain of the industrial 

 avocations — the tattered remains of that robe of disparagement, which once 

 shrouded the manly form, and embarrassed the strong arm of brown industry. 



But it is the glory of modem civilization, that its tendency is to exalt every 

 social valley; to bring down from its pride of elevation, every mountain of pri- 

 vilege; to demolish every wall of partition between the Liberal and Useful Arts; 

 to shed the light of Science on the industrial processes, and to bring all the 

 honest avocations of men, productive of social and individual good, into harmo- 

 nious and eflicient action. It proposes, ultimately and forever, to do away with 

 every social distinction dependent on birth, class, or employment — and while it 

 will multiply incalculably the aggregate amount of good wrought out by the 

 improved mechanism of human society, it propo-ses to throw the good thua 



