cts of learning, the
contribution which learning makes to labor, far exceeding in amount any
tax which the cause of learning, in schools or out, imposes upon labor.
Secondly, we see that a given amount of adult labor upon a farm, with
the help of the improved implements of industry, will accomplish more in
1856, than the same amount of adult labor, with its attendant juvenile
force, could have accomplished in 1826. If we were fully to illustrate
and sustain the latter inference, we should be required to review the
improvements made in other implements of farming, as well as in ploughs.
Their positive pecuniary value, when considered in the aggregate, is too
vast for general belief; and in England alone it must exceed the
anticipated cost of a system of public instruction, say six millions of
pounds, or thirty millions of dollars, per year. But learning, as we
have defined it, has contributed less to farming than to other
departments of labor.

The very existence of manufactures presupposes the existence of
learning. There is no branch of manufactures without its appropriate
machine; and every machine is the product of mind, enlarged and
disciplined by some sort of culture. The steam engine, the
spinning-jenny, the loom, the cotton-gin, are notable instances of the
advantages derived by manufacturing industry from the prevalence of
learning. It was stated by Chief Justice Marshall, about thirty years
ago, that Whitney's cotton-gin had saved five hundred millions of
dollars to the country; and the saving, upon the same basis, cannot now
be less than one thousand millions of dollars,--a sum too great for the
human imagination to conceive. When we contemplate these achievements of
mind, by which manual labor has been diminished, and every physical
force both magnified and economized, how unstatesmanlike is the view
which regards a human being as a bundle of muscles and bones merely,
with no destiny but ignorance, servitude, and poverty!

Ancient commerce, if we omit to notice the conjecture that the mariner's
compass was in possession of the old Phoenician and Indian navigators,
reproduced, rather than invented, in modern times, did not rest upon any
enlarged scientific knowledge; but, in this era, many of the sciences
contribute to the extension and prosperity of trade. After what has been
accomplished by science, and especially by physical geography, for
commerce and navigation, we have reason to expect a system, based u