Mr. President, one of the most striking characteristics of this age in the extraordinary progress which it has witnessed in popular knowledge.  A new and powerful impulse has been acting in the social system of late, producing this effect in a most remarkable degree.  In morals, in politics, in art, in literature, there is a vast accession to the number of readers and to the number of proficients.  The present state of popular knowledge is not the result of a slow and uniform progress, proceeding through a lapse of years, with the same regular degree of motion.  It is evidently the result of some new causes, brought into powerful action, and producing their consequences rapidly and strikingly.  What, Sir, are these causes?

This is not an occasion, Sir, for discussing such a question at length; allow me to say, however, that the improved state of popular knowledge is but the necessary result of the improved condition of the great mass of the people.  Knowledge is not one of our merely physical wants.  Life may be sustained without it.  But, in order to live, men must be fed and clothed and sheltered; and in a state of things in which one’s whole labor can do no more than procure clothes, food, and shelter, he can have no time nor means for mental improvement.  Knowledge, therefore, is not attained, and cannot be attained, till there is some degree of respite from daily manual toil and never-ending drudgery.  Whenever a less degree of labor will produce the absolute necessaries of life, then there come leisure and means both to teach and to learn.

If this great and wonderful extension of popular knowledge be the result of an improved condition, it may, in the next place, well be asked, What are the causes which have thus suddenly produced that great improvement?  How is it that the means of food, clothing, and shelter are now so much more cheaply and abundantly procured than formerly?  Sir, the main cause I take to be the progress of scientific art, or a new extension of the application of science to art.  This it is which has so much distinguished the last half-century in Europe and in America, and its effects are everywhere visible, and especially among us.  Man has found new allies and auxiliaries in the powers of nature and in the inventions of mechanism.

The general doctrine of political economy is, that wealth consists in whatever is useful or convenient to man, and that labor is the producing cause of all this wealth.  This is very true.  But, then, what is labor?  In the sense of political writers, and in common language, it means human industry; in a philosophical view, it may receive a much more comprehensive meaning.  It is not, in that view, human toil only, the mere action of thews and muscles; but it is any active agency which, working upon the materials with which the world is supplied, brings forth products useful or convenient to man.  The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their