NATIONA.L INDUSTRY. 95 



our own National Academy, at West Point, would give us such 

 a nation of laborers as the world never saw before. 



The idea that labor need not be intelligent, that it works 

 better by being debased to the condition of brute force, is a 

 relic of barbarism, and forms no part of that code of modern 

 philosophy which seeks to elevate labor and dignify and 

 Christianize the laborer. 



All great improvements in modern science, in the arts of 

 commerce, manufactures, or agriculture, have been achieved by 

 having an intelligent mind to impel the willing hand. One 

 hundred and fifty years ago there were but three coaches in 

 Paris. Now railways thread their courses over mountains and 

 along valleys, and forty-three thousand people ask as a kind of 

 popular right for free passes to attend the festivities consequent 

 upon the visit of the Queen of England to the Emperor of 

 France, at Cherbourg, and nineteen millions of passengers ride 

 over the railways of France in a single year. 



Intelligence aids the power or faculty of invention. England 

 to-day maintains her maritime, commercial and manufacturing 

 ascendency by virtue of her intelligence. The Celtic labor of 

 Ireland she employs to dig her canals, construct her railways, 

 and after this work is done, she ejects this surplus power and 

 population to Australia, or America, and keeps straightway on 

 her path of duty. She introduces none of her arts of industry 

 into Ireland. She confines her to agriculture as far as possible. 

 It was intelligence which was the creator of the wonderful 

 labor-saving machinery now in operation, the spinning jenny, 

 steam-engine, and power loom, together with all the untold 

 inventions of the age. 



All labor should be well-directed. It should be given to the 

 production of those common and daily wants of life so requisite 

 to the happiness of man, — to the cultivation of the soil, to the 

 manufacture of needful articles for domestic use, so cheap that 

 comfort can be diffused tlirough all classes of society, for the 

 general good rather than superfluous luxuries for the few. 

 That was a homely wish of the Fourth Henry of France, that 

 he hoped to see the day when every peasant in the kingdom 

 could have a fowl in his pot on Sunday. 



From individual labor we now turn to view the wider and 

 more varied theatre of the race, as exhibited in National Indus- 



