Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/683

Rh recent inventions that laboring-men have acquired the power, which may be used either wisely or unwisely, to secure and exercise the strength which comes from union, and to deal with employers and capitalists on an equal footing, if not with the conditions in their favor.

Take another illustration:

One of the most simple transactions of our lives is to purchase a postal-card for one cent, write a communication on one side, and on the opposite side a direction to a correspondent in any part of the United States or Canada, and drop it into a box on a street corner. We have no further control over or agency in it; but we are perfectly assured that it will in no long time, within a week, even if its destination is San Francisco, be delivered to the correspondent. And, if we wish to write a long letter, we have only to add another cent and purchase a postage-stamp, for which a letter weighing one ounce may in like manner be sent and delivered. Now the ability to do this is shared by rich and poor alike, for there is hardly any depth of poverty which precludes any one from doing what I have described. But there is no step in the transaction, from the purchase of the stamp or card to the delivery to the correspondent, or in the antecedent conditions which make it possible, which is not an invention. I can not attempt to enumerate the inventions directly or indirectly involved, and I refer to the matter only as an illustration of the results which have been reached by invention in placing things highly important or desirable to men within the reach of all. It is not many years since the rates of postage in this country were so high, varying from six cents to twenty-five on each sheet, that a correspondence with distant friends involved an expense which could be but sparingly indulged by laboring-men, and was felt to be a burden by many in comfortable circumstances. The cost of sending a letter four hundred miles was equal to the price of half a day's work at the common monthly rate of wages of agricultural laborers. Now a letter may be sent ten times as far, at one twelfth the cost, and in less than one tenth the time.

A few years after Watt invented the steam-engine, and while he was laboring to improve it and adapt it to the various wants of the world, a wonderful military genius arose in Europe, who tilled the world with his fame and made himself as large a place in history, perhaps, as any man ever did. lie played havoc with the nations of Europe, changed the boundaries of countries and their forms of government, and apparently raised Trance to the highest pitch of power. But he lived to destroy. Measuring Bonaparte and Watt by their works and their works by the consequences which followed them, and which must stand as the greater fact in the history of the world? Which controlled most potently, for his own time and for the future, the destiny of nations, and which most deserves the admiration and homage, not to say gratitude, of mankind?