oors had gone into Europe, and it can be truthfully said that science
was thrust into the brain of Europe upon the point of a Moorish lance.
They gave us paper, and what is printing without paper?

A bird without wings. I tell you paper has been a splendid thing.

The discovery of America, whose shores were trod by the restless feet
of adventure and the people of every nation--out of this strange
mingling of facts and fancies came the great Republic. Every fact has
pushed a superstition from the brain and a ghost from the cloud. Every
mechanical art is an educator; every loom, every reaper, every mower,
every steamboat, every locomotive, every engine, every press, every
telegraph is a missionary of science and an apostle of progress; every
mill, every furnace with its wheels and levers, in which something is
made for the convenience, for the use and the comfort and the
well-being of man, is my kind of church, and every schoolhouse is a
temple. Education is the most radical thing in this world. To teach
the alphabet is to inaugurate a revolution; to build a schoolhouse is
to construct a fort; every library is an arsenal filled with the
weapons and ammunition of progress; every fact is a monitor with sides
of iron and a turret of steel. I thank the inventors and discoverers.
I thank Columbus and Magellan. I thank Locke and Hume, Bacon and
Shakespeare. I thank Fulton and Watt, Franklin and Morse, who made
lightning the messenger of man. I thank Luther for protesting against
the abuses of the Church, but denounce him because he was an enemy of
liberty. I thank Calvin for writing a book in favor of religious
freedom, but I abhor him because he burned Servetus. I thank the
Puritans for saying that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God, and
yet I am compelled to admit that they were tyrants themselves. I thank
Thomas Paine because he was a believer in liberty. I thank Voltaire,
that great man who for half a century was the intellectual monarch of
Europe, and who, from his throne at the foot of the Alps, pointed the
finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Christendom. I thank the
inventors, I thank the discoverers, the thinkers and the scientists,
and I thank the honest millions who have toiled. I thank the brave men
with brave thoughts. They are the Atlases upon whose broad and mighty
shoulders rests the grand fabric of civilization; they are the men who
have broken, and are still breaking, the chains of superstit