Exhibition Addresses. 181 



Down, therefore, at least to the close of the sixteenth century, the 

 efi'ect of all the improvement attained in the arts of industry (and in 

 many of them this was by no means small), was but verj'- inconsider- 

 ably to increase the power of production. Many of the grandest 

 monuments of architecture existing in Europe were founded in those 

 early centuries. Many of the most admirable specimens of metal- 

 lurgic art, especially in arms and armor, in plate and jewelery, and 

 in the decorations of places and churches, originated during the same 

 period. But while the advancement of the arts in the direction of 

 skillful workmanship attained a high degree of perfection, their power 

 of producing abundantly sca^'cely made any advances at all. It was 

 hardly possible that it should ; for while the ambition of artizans was 

 directed mainly to the production of objects of luxury which only the 

 rich could buy, those humbler articles on which the daily comfort of 

 the multitude so largely depends were naturally neglected. In such 

 a state of things, the material condition of the great body of the peo- 

 ple of Europe was of necessity lamentably depressed. And so per- 

 haps it might long have continued to be, had not the power of those 

 moral causes which had operated to produce the depression been suct- 

 denly and singularly shaken. The invention of the art of printing in 

 the fifteenth centurj^, with the revival of letters in western Europe, 

 and the almost simultaneous outbursting of the storm aroused by the 

 bold movement of Luther in Germany, awakened new modes of 

 thinking and opened the way for a reconstruction of the whole social 

 system. Hitherto, the principle on which society had been organ- 

 ized in Europe, had been distinctly that of consulting the greatest 

 good of the smallest number. Hereafter there was to be an approach 

 gradual indeed, but at any rate an approach, to the opposite princi- 

 ple ; and whether governments recognized it or not, the movement 

 of the industrial world was distinctly toward the result of providing 

 for the greatest good of the greatest number. To produce articles of 

 use became now an object of as high ambition as it had previously 

 been to produce articles of luxury. And as the benefit which the 

 producer may derive from his product depends upon the promptness 

 with which it is taken off his hands, it became equally an object of 

 desire to produce useful objects cheapl}'. Thus began to be increas- 

 ingly perceived the necessity of calling in, to the aid of man's own 

 limited strength, the exhaustless powers of nature. For a long period 

 the only powers of this kind available had been and continued to be 

 those furnished by wind and falling water ; and of these practically 



