RETROGRESSIVE RELIGION. 469 



suppressing conflicts was partly that of preventing hindrance to the 

 king's wars, and partly that of asserting his authority. Adminis- 

 tration of justice, as we know it, grew up incidentally ; and began 

 with bribing the ruling man to interfere on behalf of the complain- 

 ant. Not wishes for the public weal, but wishes for private profit 

 and power, originated the regulative organizations of societies. So 

 has it been, too, with their industrial organizations. Acts of barter 

 between primitive men were not prompted by thoughts of benefits 

 to Humanity, to be eventually achieved by division of labor. When, 

 as among various peoples, on occasions of assembling to make sacri- 

 fices at sacred places, some of the devotees took with them commodities 

 likely to be wanted by others who would be there, and from whom 

 needful supplies could be got in exchange, they never dreamed that 

 they were making the first steps toward establishment of fairs, and 

 eventually of markets : purely selfish desires prompted them. Nor on 

 the part of the peddlers who, supplying themselves wholesale at these 

 gatherings, traveled about selling retail, was there any beneficent inten- 

 tion of initiating that vast and elaborate distributing system which 

 now exists. Neither they nor any men of their time had imagined 

 such a system. And the like holds of improved arts, of inventions, and, 

 in large measure, of discoveries. It was not philanthropy which 

 prompted the clearing of wild lands for the purpose of growing food ; 

 it was not philanthropy which little by little improved the breeds of 

 animals, and adapted them to human use ; it was not philanthropy 

 which in the course of time changed the primitive plow into the finished 

 modern plow. Wishes for private satisfactions were the exclusive 

 stimuli. The successive patents taken out by W^att, and his lawsuits 

 in defense of them, show that though he doubtless foresaw some of the 

 benefits which the steam-engine would confer on mankind, yet fore- 

 sight of these was not the prime mover of his acts. The long con- 

 cealment of the method of fluxions by Newton, as well as the Newton- 

 Leibnitz controversy which subsequently arose, show us that while 

 there was perception of the benefits to science, and indirectly to Hu- 

 manity, from the discoveries made by these mathematicians, yet that 

 desires to confer these benefits were secondary to other desires — largely 

 the love of scientific exploration itself, and, in a considerable degree, 

 " the last infirmity of noble minds." Nor has it been otherwise with 

 literature. Entirely dissenting, though I do, from the dictum of 

 Johnson, that " No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," 

 and knowing perfectly well that many books have been written by 

 others than " blockheads," not only without expectation of profit, but 

 with the certainty of loss ; yet I hold it clear that the majority of au- 

 thors do not differ from other men to the extent that the desire to con- 

 fer public benefit predominates over the desire to reap private benefit ; 

 in the shape of satisfied ambition if not in the shape of pecuniary re- 

 turn. And it is the same with the delights given to mankind by artis- 



