38 POPULAR SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. 



nations, and often afford to them an abundant indemnifica- 

 tion for the more sparing bestowal of natural riches. Those 

 states which remain behind in general industrial activity, iu 

 the selection and preparation of natural substances, in the ap- 

 plication of mechanics and chemistry, and where a due appre- 

 ciation of such activity fails to pervade all classes, must see 

 their prosperity diminish ; and that the more rapidly as neigh- 

 bouring states are meanwhile advancing, both in science and 

 in the industrial arts, with, as it were, renewed and youthful 

 vigour. 



The improvement of agriculture in the hands of freemen, 

 and on properties of moderate extent, the nourishing state 

 of the mechanical arts freed from the trammels of the spirit 

 of corporation, commerce augmented and animated by the 

 multiplied contact of nations with each other, are brilliant 

 results of the general progress of intelligence, and of the 

 amelioration of political and civil institutions in which that 

 progress is reflected. The picture presented by modern his- 

 tory ought to convince those who seem tardy in apprehending 

 the instruction which it is fitted to convey. Nor let it be 

 feared that the predilection for industrial progress and for 

 those branches of natural science most immediately connected 

 with it, which characterizes the age in which we live, has any 

 necessary tendency to check intellectual exertion in the fair 

 fields of classical antiquity, liistory, and philosophy ; or to 

 deprive of the life-giving breath of imagination, the arts and 

 the literature which embellish life. Where all the blossoms 

 of civilisation unfold themselves with vigour under the 

 shelter of wise laws and free institutions, there is no danger 

 of the development of the human mind in any one direction 

 proving prejudicial to it in others. Each offers to the nation 



