ience in its brief period of action, can, I am persuaded, come
to no other conclusion than this, that, in instituting a comparison, he
has established a contrast. And yet, how imperfect, how inadequate is
the catalogue of facts I have furnished in the foregoing pages! I have
said nothing of the spread of instruction by the diffusion of the arts
of reading and writing, through public schools, and the consequent
creation of a reading community; the modes of manufacturing public
opinion by newspapers and reviews, the power of journalism, the
diffusion of information public and private by the post-office and cheap
mails, the individual and social advantages of newspaper advertisements.
I have said nothing of the establishment of hospitals, the first
exemplar of which was the Invalides of Paris; nothing of the improved
prisons, reformatories, penitentiaries, asylums, the treatment of
lunatics, paupers, criminals; nothing of the construction of canals, of
sanitary engineering, or of census reports; nothing of the invention of
stereotyping, bleaching by chlorine, the cotton-gin, or of the marvelous
contrivances with which cotton-mills are filled--contrivances which have
given us cheap clothing, and therefore added to cleanliness, comfort,
health; nothing of the grand advancement of medicine and surgery, or
of the discoveries in physiology, the cultivation of the fine arts,
the improvement of agriculture and rural economy, the introduction
of chemical manures and farm-machinery. I have not referred to the
manufacture of iron and its vast affiliated industries; to those of
textile fabrics; to the collection of museums of natural history,
antiquities, curiosities. I have passed unnoticed the great subject of
the manufacture of machinery by itself--the invention of the slide-rest,
the planing-machine, and many other contrivances by which engines can
be constructed with almost mathematical correctness. I have said nothing
adequate about the railway system, or the electric telegraph, nor about
the calculus, or lithography, the airpump, or the voltaic battery; the
discovery of Uranus or Neptune, and more than a hundred asteroids; the
relation of meteoric streams to comets; nothing of the expeditions by
land and sea that have been sent forth by various governments for the
determination of important astronomical or geographical questions;
nothing of the costly and accurate experiments they have caused to be
made for the ascertainment of