136 Transactions of the American Institute. 



invents is spreading the real law of soul. The law of price fo'i 

 lows the law of manhood. A man that can only work his nuiscU. 

 has 10,000 men that are his natural rivals; but where a man goes 

 up to a work that requires calculation, nicety, punctuality, his labor 

 goes up; and men that go higher still, get a higher price, and simply 

 because God made it so; that the bottom of man's brain cost least, 

 and the highest, the highest. And so a community that is inventive 

 is progressive; it has a perpetual aspiration for better and nobler 

 things. The age of machinery and invention is not only an age of 

 culture in social matters, but also in religious and political affairs. 

 Machines have become the bones of the world. Mr. Boecher then 

 paid a tribute to the artificers. The men who hold the saw, the 

 file, are not to be forgotten. They are the private soldiers in the 

 grand army of industry; but the general, were it Grant, himself, 

 would not be much without the private soldier. And so don't for- 

 get, as you look around you, the sweaty, grimy workman, who 

 stood by the engine and moulded the mighty mass into form. 

 Alluding to the elements of American industry, Mr. Beecher said if 

 he was a Pope — no, a King — he thought he should make a better 

 King than a Pope — no young man should be a journeyman without 

 having a piece of land. There is nothing that anchors a man like 

 ground. A young man that has a good plot in the city, or an acre 

 in the country, with a good adviser in it, gives a mortgage to the 

 State that he will be thrifty, honest, sober, industrious. Such a 

 man the devil soon abandons. Where you have a whole commu- 

 nity of laborers, society begins to approach the ideal of American 

 industry. He liked Philadelphia more than New York or any 

 other city in the country, not because it has cleaner streets or 

 broader brims, but because there there is a larger percentage of 

 houses owned by those who occupy them than in any other city in 

 the world. That is the true idea of American industry. It must 

 be also virtuous, and must be deeply rooted in prosperity in the 

 household. This world is like a crate of precious good things just 

 opened. The world is even yet tenanted by men who sec not. 

 "We have yet but touched the surface. We have but just begun 

 to work the mine and dig out a few of its priceless pearls. He 

 rejoiced that we have so nobly vindicated the system of free labor, 

 and thus made this American continent the pioneer in the race of 

 the world's progress. Free labor has been triumphant from the 

 rising of the sun to the going down of the same. No imagination 

 can conceive or fancy paint the full glory of this glorious picture. 



