PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES. 31 



inveterate prepossession altogether disappear from the minds of men 

 who have entertained it. Probably they will have to be buried with 

 more or less of their prejudices still wrapped about them, but from 

 the new generation scientific and technical studies will encounter no 

 such obstruction, will suffer no such disparagement. Let us now con- 

 sider for a few moments the story of the nineteenth century, and 

 as the picture passes before our eyes accord to it the honor due to 

 such splendid achievements. 



The one great, masterful event that came in with the nineteenth 

 century was the invention of the steam-engine. This marvelous ma- 

 chine, for the space of a hundred years, has been one of the master- 

 pieces of scientific thought. It is the force that propels thousands 

 of floating palaces over all the waters of the world ; that transports the 

 commerce of continents from ocean to ocean ; that handles machinery 

 so deftly that a hundred thousand separate and distinct parallel lines 

 can be engraved upon an inch of highly polished steel ; that furnishes 

 to the busy world one hundred thousand horse-power ; that runs count- 

 less looms and mills, furnaces and factories. It annihilates time and 

 space, and gives to the laboring man full employment. The benefits 

 that have accrued to the race from the use of the steam-engine are be- 

 yond computation. Closely connected with it is the man who stands 

 by its throttle, the engineer. Go where we may, upon land and upon 

 sea, and in the bowels of the earth, there you will find him — a man 

 of science, an inventor, a whole-hearted gentleman. Look at his 

 achievements ! See the transformation produced by the Suez canal 

 in the shortening of the paths of commerce and of travel, and the 

 comforts accruing therefrom. Imagine, if you please, the wonderful 

 impetus that will certainly be given to all the interests of the great 

 republic, by the construction of the Nicaragua canal. An American 

 engineer will, ere long, do it. Consider, for a moment, those triumphs, 

 of engineering skill, the great steel bridges, the cantilever bridges, 

 the tunnels that perforate mountain barriers, and the ocean gray- 

 hounds, surpassing all the wonders and splendors of ancient Carthage, 

 Egypt, and Athens. Every enterprise of the engineer, whether the 

 construction of a bridge, of a tunnel, of a ship, of a house of twenty- 

 five stories with its steel frames, or of a Corliss engine, is an advance 

 agent of prosperity, progress, and peace. Homer, Shakspere, or Milton, 

 Balzac, George Eliot, or Thackeray, cannot inspire one with beautiful 

 thoughts or purify the fountains of life more than can a Corliss engine 

 at work with its ponderous machinery, and silently, mysteriously and 

 with the least possible friction doing its work, and turning out prod- 

 ucts of unsurpassed variety, beauty, texture, utility, and value. 

 Here, surely, is a civilizer as potent as anything that ever came from 

 poet's brain or novelist's dreams. 



