Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/108

100 mere brooks, with not more than one-thirteenth as much coal as we have in the United States, and perhaps not one-hundredth as much iron ore, by the use of steam-driven machinery produces as much iron and perhaps weaves as much cloth yearly as all the rest of the world. If it does not the latter, it would do it, if it could find enough of the raw material and paying customers. But agriculture, which supplies the raw material, though it is the first and most universal form of human labor, lags behind the world's present manufacturing power. One cause of the late, and perhaps of the previous commercial revulsion, was this disproportion. The more rapid enlargement of manufacturing industry, multiplied in power by its machinery, caused the raw material to rise in price and the manufactured article to fall, till the operations could not be supported from the profits at the same time that contracts were fulfilled with capitalists. Manufactures must pause till agriculture overtakes. Steam-machinery applied to agriculture is the only thing that can correct this disproportion, and this is what we are going to make. The world is not to be much longer dependent for its cotton on the compulsory labor of the Dark Ages, nor for its flax and corn on blistered free hands or overworked cattle. The laborer, in either section of our country, will be transformed into an ingenious gentleman or lady, comfortably mounted on a migratory steam-cultivator to direct its gigantic energies,—or, at least, occasionally so occupied. Under this system, it must be plain enough, to all persons prophetically inclined, that the Northern valleys will greatly multiply their products, while the Southern cotton-fields will whiten with heavier crops than human chattelism ever produced, and the mountains of both latitudes, now hardly notched with civilization, will roll down the wool of sheep in clouds.

Finally, with important and fruitful mechanical ideas which the world did not have twenty years ago, with machinery which no one could have believed possible one hundred years ago, and which has, since that time, quintupled the power of every free laborer in Christendom, we are going to make man what his Creator designed him to be,—always and everywhere a sub-creator. By the press we are making the knowledge of the past the knowledge of the present, the knowledge of one the knowledge of all. By the telegraph the senses of sight and hearing are to be extended around the globe. If we do not make ships to navigate the air, for ourselves, our wives, and our little ones, it will not be because we cannot, but because, being lords of land and sea, with power to traverse either with all desirable speed, we are too wise to waste force either in beating the air for buoyancy, battling with gravity like birds, on the one hand, or in paddling huge balloons against the wind, on the other. The steam-driven wheel leaves us no occasion to envy even that ubiquitous denizen of the universe, the flying-fish. We have in it the most economical means of self-transportation, as well as of mechanical production. It only remains to make the most of it. This, to be sure, will not be achieved without infinite labor and innumerable failures. The mechanical genius of the race is like the polypus anxiously stretching its tentacles in every direction, and though frustrated thousands of times, it grasps something at last.

One of the most significant structures in the world, by the way, is the United States Patent Office at Washington. No other building in that novel city means a hundredth part as much, or shows so clearly what the world's most cunning thoughts and hands are chiefly engaged with. Not that the Patent Office contains so many miracles of mechanical success; rather the contrary. Take a just appraisal of its treasures, and you will regard it rather as the chief tomb in the Père la Chaise of human hopes. What multitudes of long-nursed and dearly-cherished inventions there repose in a common grave, useful only as warnings to future inventors! One great moral of the