ously important this one science of chemistry has
proved itself even to our intellectual life! Several other sciences have
been either greatly strengthened or else altogether renewed by it, and
the wonderful photographic processes have been for nature and the fine
arts what printing was for literature, placing reliable and authentic
materials for study within the reach of every one. Literature itself has
profited by the industrial progress of the present age, in the increased
cheapness of everything that is material in books. I please myself with
the reflection that even you make paper cheaper by manufacturing so much
cotton.

All these are reasons why we ought not to be jealous of you; and now
permit me to indicate a few other reasons why it is unreasonable on your
part to feel any jealousy of us.

Suppose we were to cease working to-morrow--cease working, I mean, in
our peculiar ways--and all of us become colliers and factory operatives
instead, with nobody to supply our places. Or, since you may possibly be
of opinion that there is enough literature and science in the world at
the present day, suppose rather that at some preceding date the whole
literary and scientific and artistic labor of the human race; had come
suddenly to a standstill. Mind, I do not say of Englishmen merely, but
of the whole race, for if any intellectual work had been done in France
or Germany, or even in Japan, you would have imported it like cotton and
foreign cereals. Well, I have no hesitation in telling you that although
there was a good deal of literature and science in England before the
1st of January, 1800, the present condition of the nation would have
been a very chaotic condition if the intellectual class had ceased on
that day to think and observe and to place on record its thoughts and
observations. The life of a progressive nation cannot long go forward
exclusively on the thinking of the past: its thoughtful men must not be
all dead men, but living men who accompany it on its course. It is they
who make clear the lessons of experience; it is they who discover the
reliable general laws upon which all safe action must be founded in the
future; it is they who give decision to human action in every direction
by constantly registering, in language of comprehensive accuracy, both
its successes and its failures. It is their great and arduous labor
which makes knowledge accessible to men of action at the cost of little
effort and the sm