31 
manufacturers abroad. Those who do succeed here must 
train themselves, and to that training they owe their success, 
but it is hard work, and not to be expected of many. How- 
ever, it is clear that an entirely new spirit may be made to 
animate society in the course of a single generation, and a 
nation may be born in our own day; also, as the result has 
been, so far as the useful arts are concerned, exactly that 
which the rulers desired, we must believe that governments 
or large combinations of men have the change in their 
power. 
It was said that this progress in the arts did not neces- 
sarily go down to the whole of society. There may be 
several reasons for this: the upper classes may be far ad- 
vanced and the lower very poor, even when there is much 
good feeling. In some of the mining districts of Germany, 
sending out the most intelligent miners to distant parts for 
centuries, and teaching their own with great care in schools 
which have been imitated, but not surpassed, we find a 
population extremely poor. Nature has presented little to 
them. We cannot expect all farmers to be equally rich, 
when soils differ so much. In such cases, however, we can 
expect a careful superintendence and a thoughtful mode of 
husbanding resources, mitigating the evils of poverty, and 
producing content where otherwise abject misery would 
exist, and that we find. 
The exhibition shows how much may be done for the 
active minds of nations by a government fostering educa- 
tion, and the state of the same countries shows that intelli- 
gence, comfort, and wealth have been promoted also. Whilst 
the poorer parts alluded to, in Saxony for example, show 
that when from natural causes wealth has not been accu- 
mulated, education has produced intelligence to mitigate 
those evils which would otherwise have crushed the people. 
This education is owing to the activity of the governments. 
We learnt the lesson in this island once, and forgot it. We 
