Closing Address. 135 



disgrace. Bat now work is coming up, and the workman rises 

 higher and higher in the estimation of the ages, and work is with 

 us one of the grandest titles of nobility. It may be -thought 

 strange that a gentleman of my profession should lend his patron- 

 age to an institution like this; but he would take his place in the 

 front rank. Many are afraid of science, and they have indulged 

 in idle fears that morality might be disorganized by the discov- 

 eries of science; but you cannot, in our period of the world, carry 

 any one department fer ahead without carrying onward all other 

 departments with it. He alone preaches a true religion who brings 

 U]) not their consciences alone, but also their hands along with it. 

 You cannot touch society now at any point without ultimately 

 affecting the whole; you cannot secure national progress without 

 carrying education with it. Men who invent bring about more 

 intellectual, more social culture; for business requires as much cul- 

 ture as religion or anything else. 



" While we are speaking of labor-saving machines for the abridge- 

 ment of man's toil, he would tell them that if there is one machine 

 which ought to be inyented, it is that which teaches them how to 

 work, and what to work at. The best machine of this kind is that 

 which was invented at the first dawn of creation — Adam and Eve. 

 Put a SAvitch into the parents' hand and teach them how to use it. 

 It is doubtful whether the world will gain anything by labor-saving 

 machines — machines that supersede the love of industry. But 

 when used in an industrious and thrifty community, they augment 

 the being and the life of that community in the ratio in Avhich they 

 anniliilate space and time, and the old, worn-out grooves in which 

 the world moved in the by-gone past. In his fifty years he had 

 lived longer than his father could have lived had he existed to the 

 age of Methuselah. Take, for instance, the steam engine. He has 

 traveled more in his life than his father ever did. He can travel more 

 in three days now than his father could in a month. Knowledge 

 increases and papers increase. The administration of knowledge is 

 improving, too, as well as material prosperity, and now we live 

 longer in a day than our ancestors did in a year; and the time is 

 coming when a man will not read telegraphic news, but only the 

 heads of subjects. Industry is a moral force in the world. It is 

 impossible that a man should be an inventor and be a dullard. He 

 that points new things in metal, in leather, in fur, is not merely 

 giving various forms to matter, but to mind. The mind works 

 in every iron machine, turns in every wheel, and every man that 



