SCIENCE AND CULTURE 129 



the improvement of manufacturing processes is only one 

 of the conditions which contribute to the prosperity of 

 industry. Industry is a means and not an end; and 

 mankind work only to get something which they want. 

 What that something is depends partly on their innate, 

 and partly on their acquired, desires. 



If the wealth resulting from prosperous industry is 

 to be spent upon the gratification of unworthy desires, if 

 the increasing perfection of manufacturing processes is 

 to be accompanied by an increasing debasement of those 

 who carry them on, I do not see the good of industry 

 and prosperity. 



Now it is perfectly true that men's views of what is 

 desirable depend upon their characters; and that the 

 innate proclivities to which we give that name are not 

 touched by any amount of instruction. But it does not 

 follow that even mere intellectual education may not, 

 to an indefinite extent, modify the practical manifesta- 

 tion of the characters of men in their actions, by sup- 

 plying them with motives unknown to the ignorant. A 

 pleasure-loving character will have pleasure of some sort ; 

 but, if you give him the choice, he may prefer pleasures 

 which do not degrade him to those which do. And this 

 choice is offered to every man, who possesses in literary 

 or artistic culture a never-failing source of pleasures, 

 which are neither withered by age, nor staled by custom, 

 nor embittered in the recollection by the pangs of self- 

 reproach. 



If the Institution opened to-day fulfils the intention of 

 its founder, the picked intelligences among all classes of 

 the population of this district will pass through it. No 

 child born in Birmingham, henceforward, if he have the 

 capacity to profit by the opportunities offered to him, 

 first in the primary and other schools, and afterwards in 

 the Scientific College, need fail to obtain, not merely 



