INFLUENCE OF INVENTIONS ON CIVILIZATION 665 



recent inventions that laboring-men have acquired the power, which 

 may be used either wisely or unwisely, to secure and exercise the 

 strength which comes from union, and to deal with employers and 

 capitalists on an equal footing, if not with the conditions in their favor. 



Take another illustration : 



One of the most simple transactions of our lives is to purchase a 

 postal-card for one cent, write a communication on one side, and on 

 the opposite side a direction to a correspondent in any part of the 

 United States or Canada, and drop it into a box on a street corner. 

 We have no further control over or agency in it ; but we are per- 

 fectly assured that it will in no long time, within a week, even if its 

 destination is San Francisco, be delivered to the correspondent. And, 

 if we wish to write a long letter, we have only to add another cent 

 and purchase a postage-stamp, for which a letter weighing one ounce 

 may in like manner be sent and delivered. Now the ability to do 

 this is shared by rich and poor alike, for there is hardly any depth of 

 poverty which precludes any one from doing what I have described. 

 But there is no step in the transaction, from the purchase of the 

 stamp or card to the delivery to the correspondent, or in the antece- 

 dent conditions which make it possible, which is not an invention. I 

 can not attempt to enumerate the inventions directly or indirectly 

 involved, and I refer to the matter only as an illustration of the re- 

 sults which have been reached by invention in placing things highly 

 important or desirable to men within the reach of all. It is not 

 many years since the rates of postage in this country were so high, 

 varying from six cents to twenty-five on each sheet, that a correspond- 

 ence with distant friends involved an expense which could be but 

 sparingly indulged by laboring-men, and was felt to be a burden by 

 many in comfortable circumstances. The cost of sending a letter four 

 hundred miles was equal to the price of half a day's work at the com- 

 mon monthly rate of wages of agricultural laborers. Now a letter may 

 be sent ten times as far, at one twelfth the cost, and in less than one 

 tenth the time. 



A few years after "Watt invented the steam-engine, and while he 

 was laboring to improve it and adapt it to the various wants of the 

 world, a wonderful military genius arose in Europe, who filled the 

 world with his fame and made himself as large a place in history, per- 

 haps, as any man ever did. He played havoc with the nations of Eu- 

 rope, changed the boundaries of countries and their forms of govern- 

 ment, and apparently raised France to the highest pitch of power. But 

 he lived to destroy. Measuring Bonaparte and "Watt by their works 

 and their works by the consequences which followed them, and which 

 must stand as the greater fact in the history of the world ? AVhich 

 controlled most potently, for his own time and for the future, the des- 

 tiny of nations, and which most deserves the adraii-ation and homage, 

 not to say gratitude, of mankind ? 



