OUR INDEBTEDNESS TO INVENTORS AND MECHANICS. 213 



barns through the aid of improved saw-mills and other wood-working machin- 

 ery. He lives in a house whose boards are dressed and matched by machinery, 

 whose shingles, sash, blinds, doors, casings and moldings are all machine 

 made. The paint upon it is ground and mixed by machinery. The carpets 

 that cover the doors and the paper that decorates the walls are made by 

 machinery, invented since he was born. Ilis house is warmed by stoves and 

 furnaces, and lighted at night by lamps that a king's money could not have 

 bought at the begining of this century. The cooking stoves and ranges of his 

 kitchen enable his wife and daughter to do their work in half the time and 

 with half the trouble required before Franklin and EliphaletNott invented and 

 improved modern cast-iron stoves. The boots and shoes for hitnself and 

 family are made by machinery and the chemist's art has given him a material 

 for waterproof foot coverings utterly unknown to our fathers fifty years ago. 

 Thanks to the kindly otHces of the inventors of the cotton gin, the spinning 

 frame, the power loom, the knitting machine and the sewing machine, all less 

 and some much less than a hundred years old, he and his family are better 

 clad than .were his father and mother, while his wife rising above a menial labor- 

 er has time to leurn to read and to write lie and his wife may ride to marketer to 

 church in a finer spring and covered coach than the richest monarch of Europe 

 could own two hundred years ago. Instead of covering his fire upon the stone 

 hearth and creeping at dusk dull and tired to bed, his family at evening now 

 gather in well lighted, well war.ned and well furnished rooms, and amuse or 

 instruct themselves with books and music, or read from the morning paper the 

 news of the day before, gathered for him by the telegraph from every part of 

 the habitable globe, a thing undreamed of by our fathers of forty years ago. 

 He is better fed, better clothed, better housed, and by the aid of the inventors' 

 labor-saving devices he is enabled to snatch from dull toil the leisure and the 

 strength to cultivate his mind, to enlarge his understanding and to make of 

 himself a wiser, a better and a grander man. 



These, my friends, are the two contrasted pictures. These are the advant- 

 ages which we of to-day have over those of but yesterd y. But you say accum- 

 ulated wealth has bought them. No, indeed, wealth could not buy them till 

 the busy brain of the inveutor had devised, and the cunning hand of the 

 mechanic had made them. The very wealth that buys these comforts and 

 luxuries the inventor himself first created and made possible. 



Sucli, then, seems to be the debt the farmer, and we all owe to the genius of 

 the inventor and the skill of the mechanic. It is true, there is a counter obli- 

 gation. The farmer has fed the mechanic, as he has all the rest of the world; 

 and he has furnished a large part of the raw material upon which the others 

 have labored and on which tlie inventor's craft has been exerted. Cotton and 

 wool and wheat and grass must first be grown before there is any need or 

 possibility of cotton gins, power looms, reapers and mowers. In fact agri- 

 culture and the mechanic arts have such common and interacting interests, 

 are so mutually helpful to each other and so mutually dpendent that one 

 cannot thrive while the other languishes; and the effort of every wise and 

 liberal minded man should be to cultivate and to foster both in equal 

 degree and by every possible means. 



Prest. Willits: I would like to make some remarks on the patent question. 

 We don't need to enlarge on Prof. McLouth's paper to be fully impressed with 

 the great benefit conferred upon our day and generation by the inventor. How 

 has that been secured? Man invented in the past. Fancy was free in the 



