464 JAMES WATT. 
your virtues, your knowledge, not one of you shall over- 
step the boundary of your caste ;” that a foolish custom, 
in short, since such a custom exists, should no longer 
blot the institutions of a great nation ! 
Let us trust to the future. A time will come when the 
science of destruction will bow before the arts of peace ; 
when the genius which multiplies our powers, which 
creates new products, which spreads comfort among 
masses of people, will occupy that place in the general 
esteem of mankind, that reason and good sense assign to 
it already. 
Watt will then appear before the grand jury of the 
two worlds. Every one will see him, aided by his steam- 
engine, penetrate in a few weeks into the bowels of the 
earth to depths where, before him, we could not have 
arrived without a century’s most painful efforts ; he will 
dig spacious galleries there, and will clear them in a 
few minutes of the immense volumes of water that used 
to inundate them daily; he will drag from a virgin soil 
the inexhaustible riches that nature deposited there. 
Uniting delicacy with power, Watt will twist with 
equal success the enormous strands of the colossal cable 
by which the man-of-war moors itself in the midst of the 
chafed ocean—and the microscopic filaments of that lace, 
of that aerial web, which forms so favourite a portion of 
the various dresses introduced by fashion. 
A few oscillations of this same machine will restore to 
acriculture vast swamps; thus fertile countries will be 
rescued from the periodical and fatal miasma that used 
to be fostered there by the burning summer-suns. 
The great mechanical powers that we used to have to 
seek in mountainous regions, at the foot of large water- 
falls, now, thanks to Watt’s discovery, will arise at will, 
