ADDRESS. 23 
tellectual factor of production is continually increasing ; while the values 
of raw material and fuel are lessening factors. It may be that when the 
dreaded time of exhausted fuel has arrived, its importation from other 
coal-fields, such as those of New South Wales, will be so easy and cheap 
that the increased technical education of our operatives may largely over- 
balance the disadvantages of increased cost in fuel. But this supposes 
that future Governments in England will have more enlightened views as 
to the value of science than past Governments have possessed. 
Industrial applications are but the overflowings of science welling 
over from the fulness of its measure. Few would ask now, as was con- 
stantly done a few years ago, ‘ What is the use of an abstract discovery 
in science?’ Faraday once answered this question by another, ‘ What 
is the use of a baby?’ Yet round that baby centre all the hopes and 
sentiments of his parents, and even the interests of the State, which 
interferes in its upbringing so as to ensure it being a capable citizen. 
The processes of mind which produce a discovery or an invention are 
rarely associated in the same person, for while the discoverer seeks to 
explain causes and the relations of phenomena, the inventor aims at pro- 
ducing new effects, or at least of obtaining them in a novel and efficient 
way. In this the inventor may sometimes succeed without much know- 
ledge of science, though his labours are infinitely more productive when 
he understands the causes of the effects which he desires to produce. 
A nation in its industrial progress, when the competition of the world 
is keen, cannot stand still. Three conditions only are possible for it. It 
may go forward, retrograde, or perish. Its extinction as a great nation 
follows its neglect of higher education, for, as described in the proverb of 
Solomon, ‘ They that hate instruction love death.’ In sociology, as in 
biology, there are three states. The first of balance, when things grow 
neither better nor worse; the second that of elaboration or evolution, as 
we see it when animals adapt themselves to their environments; and the 
third, that of degeneration, when they rapidly lose the ground they have 
-made. For a nation, a state of balance is only possible in the early stage 
of its existence, but it is impossible when its environments are constantly 
changing. 
The possession of the raw materials of industry and the existence of a 
surplus population are important factors for the growth of manufactures 
in the early history of a nation, but afterwards they are bound up with 
another factor—the application of intellect to their development. England 
could not be called a manufacturing nation till the Elizabethan age. No 
doubt coal, iron, and wool were in abundance, though, in the reign of 
the Plantagenets, they produced little prosperity. Wool was sent to 
Flanders to be manufactured, for England then stood to Holland as 
Australia now does to Yorkshire. The political crimes of Spain from the 
reign of Ferdinand and Isabella to that of Philip III. destroyed it as a 
great manufacturing nation, and indirectly led to England taking its 
position. Spain, through the activity and science of the Arabian intellect, 
