Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/15

12 need of you, but all are members one of another. Knowledge is no longer confined to a privileged sect. There is no royal way to anything, much less to learning. Science, the glory and solace of the greatest minds, is everywhere on the side of humanity.

If you would test for yourselves if there be such an element in our modern life as the enthusiasm of humanity, you must not look for it in parliaments or in the church, or in the army, or among lawyers, or in the wider fields of trade, where the vain make their riches and fools lay up their store; but you must look for it in that grand un sectarian commerce of the wide world with which science is intimately connected, and to which it owes its triumphs in the past and its larger hope of greater triumph in the future. In the laboratory of science you find the great men of our time plotting how to destroy space to kill pain, abolish disease, take contagion captive, and make the evil spirits of corruption and decay the servants and slaves of man.

What the grand army of commerce has done for the higher science, the smaller armies of trade have done for the skilled workman; these in their turn have conquered difficulties, which benumbed the larger number of unskilled labourers; and planting, sowing, hedging and ditching, and the mere drudgery of toil have become connected with a superior organisation and the labourers have thereby improved. In other words, what the head designed and the hands and feet carried out, has produced a result in favour of the body to which both belong. These are but a few of the changes which mark our own immediate time, which we must keep steadily in mind while we contemplate the labour traffic and seek to find for it a sure and rational footing.

Make an imaginary voyage in likeness to my real voyage, and sail from any port you like in the east to the west, from north to south, and box the entire compass, you will find a precisely similar state of things—islands linked to each other; and these to continents by a service which has grown into a necessity of Nature, demanding the exercise of the highest skill to maintain and direct, by means of which, things are brought into daily common use which, but a short while ago, were only known in the laboratories of scientific men, or were monopolies in the grip of the rich. So that you may safely say the high result which humanity has achieved in freedom, knowledge, prescience, skill, and courage, is the force which directs and rules the industrial war whose field is the world; for the benefit of the world, and not for the mere pleasure and advantage of a privileged few.

That which at present has not come under the supervision of the head of this army will, sooner or later, have to come under that supervision until the humblest member of the whole of the industrial force shares in the advancement of its veterans, and the beneficent result of the conquests which can never be reversed. It is one of the greatest encouragements we can carry in our hearts to know that at the head and front of this world's industrial war, the brightest and best intellect the world possesses, sits enthroned in absolute command. The genius of Watt, Stephenson, Brunel, Faraday and the rest, has become the inheritance of