565 



and exhibiting to each other, specimens of your various productions, ia 

 agriculture, in manufactures, in labor saving machinery — in the mode 

 of rearing and improving stock, suggesting and receiving ideas of fur- 

 ther improvement, and giving to each in a tangible form, the benefit of 

 the observation and experience of all. 



Without going into the discussion of all these various improvements, 

 let me illustrate the principle upon which improvements in machinery 

 operate for the general benefit of the masses — and the same will apply 

 with equal truth to the various discoveries in chemistry, and other nat- 

 ural sciences. You have a certain amount of labor to perform in any 

 branch of business, say in the raising of wheat, or the manufacture of 

 cloth ; to do that labor by hand, or the method formerly in use, would 

 require the labor of twenty men for a given period of time. Now 

 some enthusiast, some projector — (for those who think intensely enough 

 upon any subject to make improvements or to discover a new principle, 

 or have the courage to defy the arbitrary formulas of the public opin- 

 ion of the time, are very generally looked upon by the less thinking 

 masses as half insane,) — some such projector constructs for you a ma- 

 chine, which, with the labor of a single man, will do all the work of the 

 twenty men. Here you save the labor of nineteen men, less the cost 

 of the machine; you can produce twenty times as much with the same 

 labor, or the same amount of product with one-twentieth of that labor ; 

 the labor of nineteen men has been set free to be engaged in some 

 other useful production ; you can sell your wheat or your cloth at a 

 much less price, and all who use wheat or cloth can obtain it with so 

 much less of their labor; and so on, through all the departments and 

 occupations of life. 



By such processes as these, articles of necessity or comfort, before at- 

 tainable only by the rich, are now brought within the means of the 

 poorest ; and as the same amount of the necessaries and conveniences 

 of life is produced with less labor and in less time, each individual can 

 now devote a larger portion of his time to mental labor, to the acqui- 

 sition of knowledge, which again leads to further improvement in the 

 arts of life, in labor saving processes and machinery, and so onward 

 with accelerated velocity, and to an indefinite extent, I have not the 

 time, nor is it necessary to particularize the various inventioiK which 

 tend to produce such results — such is the tendency of all But the in- 



