16 THE TIME FACTOR IN THE PROBLEM. 



strike one who has given little or no study to the subject 

 as quite extravagant. It is easy to see how a great bat- 

 tle may in a day prove decisive of a nation's future. A 

 political revolution or a diplomatic act in some great cri- 

 sis may cut the thread of destiny ; but how is it possible 

 that a few years of national growth, in time of peace, 

 may be thus fateful? Great civilizations have been the 

 product of ages. Their character is slowly developed, 

 and changes therein are slowly wrought. What are 

 twenty years in a nation's growth, that they should be 

 so big with destiny ? 



It must not be forgotten that the pulse and the pace of 

 the world have been marvelously quickened during the 

 nineteenth century. Much as we boast its achievements, 

 not every one appreciates how large a proportion of the 

 world's progress in civilization has been made since the 

 application of steam to travel, commerce, manufactures, 

 and printing. At the beginning of this century there 

 was very little travel. Men lived in isolated communi- 

 ties. Mutually ignorant, they naturally were mu- 

 tually suspicious. In English villages a stranger was an 

 enemy. Under such conditions there could be little ex- 

 change of ideas and less of commodities. Buxton says : 

 ' ' Intercourse is the soul of progress. " The impetus given 

 to intercommunication of every sort by the application 

 of steam was the beginning of a new life in the world. 

 Crompton's spinning mule was invented in 1775 ; Cart- 

 wright's power-loom in 1787 ; and Whitney's cotton-gin 

 in 1793 ; but they did not come into common use until 

 the nineteenth century. At the outbreak of the Revolu- 

 tionary War there were in use in English and American 

 homes the same primitive means by which the world's 

 Avool and flax had been reduced to yarn for thousands 

 of years ; the same rude contrivance used in ancient My- 

 cenae and Troy by Homer's heroines. There are men 

 alive to-day, whose mothers, like Solomon's virtuous 

 woman, laid their hands to the spindle and distaff, and 

 knew no other waj^. William Fairbairn, an eminent 

 mechanic, states that ' ' in the beginning of the century 



