Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/16

13 every British home, directing its rule, regulating its mental and moral force, dictating what shall be done with our boys; and this, which I have called an encouragement, is also a guarantee that the progress which has been made can never be arrested; the good which has been achieved shall grow, and the improvement in all that makes life worth living, has become as palpable as the means by which it was acquired. Cobb's coaches will never supersede railways. Water-wheels, even if driven by Niagara, will never displace steam; the wooden telegraph on a hill can never do the work of the sub-marine wire. There is no going back on Watt, Stephenson, Brunei, Faraday, and the rest, while the advance which has been sounded even within the past year, bids fair to carry us over a vaster surface than we have as yet surveyed; and I think you should bear in mind here, that this vast war—this industrial struggle, which has now been going on for fifty years, without any material interruption, owes nothing whatever to Government; on the contrary, it has gone on, conquering and to conquer, in spite of the obstruction of Government, insane legislative restrictions, and the mischievous regulations of Parliaments. That war for the acquisition of material wealth was begun and continued by private enterprise, and is being conducted solely by the free citizens of the best races of mankind for the good of mankind, and not for the aggrandisement of dynasties, the prestige of Governments, or the exclusive good of one race or people.

Now, co-existent with the casting of that net of railways over the world, and the beginning of our modern industrial war, whose field is the world, was the discovery of Australian gold—a discovery which liberated two-hundred and fifty millions of sovereigns from central gloom in thirty years, and allowed them to go where they would. Had that discovery been made three thousand years ago, a golden calf would been set up, and all nations compelled to come and bow down and worship. Had that discovery been made by Alexander the Great, Mount Olympus had been changed into a shrine, and all the world gone mad on art. Had the discovery been made by Charles V., or his melancholy, bloody-minded son, Philip II., the church would have become a military power vaster and more detestable than that of Islam, and all the world been alternately paralysed with the fear of an illimitable and everlasting stink pot, and buoyed up with the hope of a heaven made of lawn clouds in which the matins should go on till vespers, and a never changing eternity be passed in saying prayers in the Spanish or Latin tongues.

Had the discovery of Australian gold been made by George III., North America would still be the unhappy hunting ground of the savage, and German States and German kings and German queens and high serenities [sic] would now be as abundant as German silver, and the great world had gone idly-strutting about with nothing but bands of music for its leaders. Had the discovery been made by Napoleon the First, the world would have been made into a barracks, and we should all have been colonels or corporals, except the women, who would never have been anything save mere mothers and cooks.

But the discovery was not made in the interest of hoary superstition