pes, spectroscopes, chronometers, aerostats, telegraphs, and
machinery generally. [Sidenote: Effect of mechanical inventions.] The
tendency in every direction has been to practical applications. More
accurate knowledge implies increasing power, greater wealth, higher
virtue. The morality of man is enhanced by the improvement of his
intellect and by personal independence. Our age has become rational,
industrial, progressive. In its great physical inventions Europe may
securely trust. There is nothing more to fear from Arabian invasions or
Tartar irruptions. The hordes of Asia could be swept away like chaff
before the wind. Let him who would form a correct opinion of the
position of man in the present and preceding phases of his progress
reflect on the losses of Christendom in Asia and Africa, in spite of all
the machinery of an Age of Faith, and the present security of Europe
from every barbarian or foreign attack.

From almost any of the branches of industry facts might be presented
illustrating the benefits arising from the application of physical
discoveries. As an example, I may refer to the cotton manufacture.

[Sidenote: Illustration from the cotton manufacture.] In a very short
time after the mechanical arts were applied to the manufacture of
textile fabrics, so great was the improvement that a man could do more
work in a day than he had previously done in a year. That manufacture
was moreover accompanied by such collateral events as actually
overturned the social condition throughout Europe. Among these were the
invention of the steam-engine, the canal system, the prodigious
development of the iron manufacture, the locomotive, and railroads;
results not due to the placemen and officers to whom that continent had
resigned its annals, whose effigies encumber the streets of its cities,
but to men in the lower walks of life. The assertion is true that James
Watt, the instrument maker, conferred on his native country more solid
benefits than all the treaties she ever made and all the battles she
ever won. Arkwright was a barber, Harrison a carpenter, Brindley a
millwright's apprentice.

[Sidenote: Development of the cotton manufacture in England.] By the
labours of Paul or of Wyatt, who introduced the operation of spinning by
rollers, a principle perfected by Arkwright; by the rotating
carding-engine, first devised by Paul; by the jenny of Highs or
Hargreaves; the water-frame; the mule, invented by Crompton, so grea