t every electric light, and
tear up every telegraphic cable from the beds of innumerable rivers and
seas. We should have to take ether and chloroform from the surgeon, and
galvanized iron and India rubber from the arts, and give up every sort
of machine moved by steam.

[Illustration: Lamp and sadiron]

[Illustration: Postrider (Footnote: From an old print, 1760)]

%92. State of the Arts, Sciences, and Industry.%--The appliances left
on the list, because in some form they were known to the men of 1763,
would now be thought crude and clumsy. There were printing presses in
those days,--perhaps fifty in all the colonies. But they were small,
were worked by hand, and were so slow that the most expert pressman
using one of them could not have printed so much in three working days
as a modern steam press can run off in five minutes. There was a general
post, and Benjamin Franklin was deputy postmaster-general for the
northern district of the colonies. But the letters were carried thirty
miles a day by postriders on horseback, and there were never more than
three mails a week between even the great towns. Every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday a postrider left New York city for Philadelphia.
Every Monday and Thursday another left New York for Boston. Once each
week a rider left for Albany on his way to Quebec. On the first
Wednesday of each month a packet boat sailed from New York for Falmouth,
England, with the mail, and this was the only mail between Great Britain
and her American colonies. We put electricity to a thousand uses; but in
1763 it was a scientific toy. Franklin had just proved by his experiment
with the kite that lightning and electricity were one and the same, and
several other men were amusing themselves and their hearers by ringing
bells, exploding powder, and making colored sparks. But it was put to no
other use. If we take up a daily newspaper published in one of our great
cities and read the column of wants, we find in them twenty occupations
now giving a comfortable living to millions of men. Yet not one of these
twenty existed in 1763. The district messenger, the telegraph operator,
the typewriter, the stenographer, the bookkeeper, the canvasser, the
salesman, the commercial traveler, the engineer, the car driver, the
hackman, the conductor, the gripman, the brakeman, the electrician, the
lineman, the elevator boy, and a host of others, follow trades and
occupations which had no existence in the middle of