PT. m. Progress and Civilisation. 163 



of human progress is as clear and abundant as in 

 the earliest steps of Man. 



Let us take that great invention of our own day 

 the construction of Railways. When the single 

 mind of George Stephenson elaborated the plan of 

 the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, or of the 

 other lines which his prolific and calculating brain 

 perfected, he worked alone. The conception was the 

 produce of his powerful intellect ; and if to him we 

 add the names of Brunei and two or three others of 

 the greatest and most eminent engineers, we shall 

 find that the whole Railway system of England was 

 put in motion by a very few master minds. Yet what 

 a prodigious amount of labour was required to execute 

 them ! How many navvies have toiled in tunnels or 

 in cuttings and embankments ! We have most of us 

 probably watched the progress of some of these works ; 

 there is a set of powerful men in their shirts with 

 their bare muscular arms engaged in filling wheel- 

 barrows with soil, trundling them along a narrow 

 plank, tilting them over at the end of it, and 

 returning with their barrows to repeat the same 

 operation. It is difficult to conceive any work of 

 man requiring less the use of his mental powers. 

 The operation is merely mechanical, and I am not 



