MICHIGAN STATE POMOLOQICAL SOCIETY. 59 



and progress. Despotic power, national pride, and aspirations 

 for personal renown, have contributed to swell the amount of 

 the distinctive difference thus created. 



Commercial enterprise has ever been cherished, both as a 

 source of profit to the merchant, and for the articles of taste 

 and comfort it has been wont to furnish alike to palate and 

 person. We now speak of the extent and variety of trafic, 

 and not of the facilities for land and water transit. Beasts of 

 burden, overland, and clumsy craft for the water, were the 

 principal means employed for ages. As recently as the time 

 when Venice, through her merchant princes, controlled the 

 commerce of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, very 

 slight improvements had been made in naval architecture, 

 always excepting the high-beaked, elegant, scull-driven gon- 

 dolas of her own canals. 



Mechanic art, in its extended sense, was early pressed to its 

 utmost tension for supplying not only the wants and con- 

 veniences of men, but to meet the large demands of taste, 

 whether ostentatious, voluptuous, or refined. Genius and 

 talent were alike subsidized, whilst invention, discovery, and 

 improvement were, at times, rewarded with the contents of 

 public treasuries, to be replenished again by cruel exactions 

 from agricultural classes. 



When viewed with an understanding eye, a popular error 

 seems to have prevailed in regard to the genius and attain- 

 ments of the old Roman world. As a race, they could imi.'.ate, 

 but not invent. The could furnish hand-pattern artisans, but 

 they borrowed from Greece, Egypt, and fr:m Assyria, their 

 exquisite designs and models, and imported their principal 

 architects. With a few noble exceptions, they were neither a 

 literary nor scientific people. They were servile copyists. 

 .Even their, system of jurisprudence, down to their Emperors, 

 was derived from Greece, and compiled by an Ephesian. 

 Their refinements were ostentatious, their pleasures were sen- 

 sual, and their amusements often brutal. Their genius was 

 for war, and their principal progress was in human slaughter. 



