Thus we see that the strength, wealth, and happiness of a nation, depend very much upon facility of communication.  The ill-defended spot in the empire is alive to the reality, that subsidies having bad roads or a tedious navigation to pass may arrive too late to present an effectual resistance to a plundering enemy.  The hard-working emigrant of a remote settlement, distant from a market, feels the difficulty and loss he sustains in bringing produce to the spot where merchants and dealers meet for the purposes of exchange.  A spot uncommunicated with may be visited by the honors of famine, and no channel exist for conveying thither the food required.  A grievous pestilence may sweep off an isolated people before the aid of the physician can arrive to arrest its progress.

Such facts are obvious to even the most indifferent observers of human society.  Yet, nevertheless, there have been, and are, short-sighted individuals, in every gradation of it, with minds and views so warped and distorted by an ignorant selfishness, that they have opposed every improvement which tended to make the least change in their long-established habits.  Such persons were they, who, during the last century, promoted petitions from counties in the neighbourhood of London, praying Parliament not to extend the turnpike-roads into remoter parts of the country, lest these remote districts, by means of a less expensive labour, should be able to sell their agricultural products in the London markets at a cheaper rate than themselves!—­and such in our own day are the attempts made to put down steam conveyance.  How short-sighted we are!  Did we consult our own advantage we should see that those facilities of communication, against which we oppose ourselves, are the growing sinews of a greater fabric of wealth and prosperity.

Such are the numerous and important advantages, in a commercial point of view, which will result to society from the substitution of elementary for physical power.  But even these, great though they be, are of trifling consideration when compared with the immense benefits which will result from the substitution when brought into operation as an economic principle.

Substitution of Steam for Horse Power.

[Mr. Gordon then refers to the conclusion of political economists “that the grand source of all our evils is redundancy of population; or in other words, an increase of animated life beyond the nourishment adequate to support it.”]

The substitution of inanimate for animate power, if not the panacea which is to cure all the evils of our condition, is at least one that comes recommended as a matter of fact—­easy of operation, and effectual in its result.  If want of food, or, in other words, redundancy of population be the bane of the country, it does not propose to meet that evil by a visionary project, tending in its operation to unhinge society—­tedious in its process, and ending at length in bitter disappointment—­but it meets the evil directly, substantially, and effectually, by the substitution of food.