Take a very recent invention, the gasolene engine.  It has already given us the automobile and the flying machine, and heaven only knows what yet may come with that gasolene engine.  My first ride in an automobile was taken in the campaign of 1896; since then something like seventeen million automobiles have been brought into use.

Have you thought of the value of the ice machine?  In Apalachicola, Florida, they have erected a little monument to a former citizen, Dr. John Gorry.  A statue of him will be found in the capitol at Tallahassee, and the state of Florida has put another in the Hall of Fame at Washington.  Out of his brain came the idea that made it possible for the world to have ice to-day without regard to the temperature outside.  What did Gorry earn when he gave the world the ice machine?

When I first visited the Patent Office at Washington I saw a model of the first sewing machine.  On it was a card on which was written: 

  “Mine are sinews superhuman,
    Ribs of brass and nerves of steel;
  I’m the iron needle woman,
    Born to toil but not to feel.”

What did the man earn who gave the world a sewing machine?

These are only a few of the great inventions.  Let us take up another group.  To show how wide is the field of measureless endeavour, I call attention to the work of scientists.  Who will measure the value of anesthetics in the treatment of disease and injury?  What of vaccination and the labours of Pasteur?  Who will estimate the value of the service rendered by the man who gave us a remedy for typhoid?  In 1898 hundreds died of typhoid fever in the little army that was raised for the war with Spain—­twenty-seven of my regiment died of that disease.  Now we have a remedy so complete that of the nearly a million men who reached the battle-line in France not one died of typhoid, and only one hundred and twenty-five of the four millions called to the colours.

Have you tried to estimate the service rendered by Reed, who, in finding a remedy for yellow fever, made the tropics habitable and made it possible for the United States to add the Panama Canal to our great achievements?

But the field is larger still.  Raikes established a Sunday school and now we have Sunday schools all over the world; Williams organized a Young Men’s Christian Association and now there are nine thousand associations and more than a million and a half members march under the banners of that organization, half of them in the United States.  Forty years ago a young preacher in Portland, Maine, gathered a few young people about him and formed a Christian Endeavour Society; now it numbers more than four million members.  That young preacher, Dr. Francis E. Clark, is now one of the great religious leaders of the world and is Commander-in-Chief of this militant organization which is larger than the army that did our part in the World War.  What has he earned?