48 
TRANSACTION'S OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
to its attention to science and its allies. To all intents and purposes 
our nation has just about completed its first century of history and 
achievement; and yet, man to man, we hear no more resemblance to our 
boyhood — with the hare exception of the forum and, perhaps, letters — 
than the eagle hears to the snowbird. Horace Greely once remarked 
that he believed that the history of the progress of the human race could 
he traced with more accuracy at the patent office than at the national 
library — and yet not a model exists that is not a type of the hrainwork 
of some patient plodder who toiled often without reward, either in ap- 
lause or cash. We were at the beginning of the century widely sepa- 
rated, a few States, with a few counties loosely and lightly bound 
together in fact, and partially in theory. It is not surprising that the 
doctrine of State’s rights was advocated, for it was the only working 
theory. But State’s rights always implied State’s duties, and no one 
knew this and emphasized it more than Mr. Jefferson. We are to-day, 
as a nation, more compact in effectiveness than one State was at the 
beginning of the century. We can travel from the most easterly to the 
most westerly part of our country in less time than one State could have 
been traversed in the twenties. The whole pulse of the country can he 
touched in the one-hundredth part of the time that it would have taken 
at the beginning of the century. Gall it a process of evolution, progress, 
destiny, course of human events, or what you will, hut take out the 
problem of this development, the factors that science has contributed, 
and my opinion is that we would not be considered as a nation except 
in the light of a curious failure to appreciate one of the greatest agencies > 
of nation-making. It is said that Napoleon once remarked in regard 
to China: “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep.” In com- 
parison with our present position among the nations of the earth, had it 
not been for the contributions that science has made, we, too, would 
have been a sleeping giant, and it might have been a very young giant 
at that. State’s rights would undoubtedly he a doctrine to-day. The 
change is not the verification of any statesman’s theory, hut it was 
wrought by agencies of which the early statesmen never dreamed. It 
was often the silent and poorly paid scientist in his laboratory that 
largely wrought this change in our political system. The railway and 
telegraph have done more for nationalization than the statesman or 
legist. You may call it organization, hut organization was the direct 
result and was preceded by the two great discoveries alluded to, namely 
the railway and telegraph systems. Eliminate the controversy in regard 
to slavery, and the same result as to nationalization would have oc- 
curred, if not in ’61, then later. No theory triumphed because it was 
right, and none went down because it was wrong. It was all the result 
of agencies that were without the conception of the statesmen of either 
