all events of a century ago, we may estimate that they have, together, accomplished more in this period which we now celebrate than could have been done in a millenium of milleniums without these now subjected genii.  But the power behind all these curious inventions and their work is that of steam.  The steam engine even supplies power to the telegraph and transports words and thought as well as cotton bales and coal.

And now what has this combination of legislation for private protection and public good, of a genius producing great inventions, and of the accumulated capital of earlier years, brought about?

It has given us the best fruits of science in permanent possession.  The study of science invariably aids, in a thousand ways, the progress of mankind.  It gives us new conceptions of nature and of the possibilities of art; it promotes right ways of work and of study; it teaches the inventor and the discoverer how most surely and promptly to gain their several ends, it gives the world the results of all acquired knowledge in concrete form.  This one instance which we are now especially interested in contemplating has performed more wonderful miracles than ever Aladdin’s genii attempted.  One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives forty thousand spindles, applies a thousand horse power to daily work in the spinning of threads, the weaving of cloth, the impulsion of a steamboat, or the drawing of great masses of hot iron into finest wire.  This puny creature, his mind in his finger tips, exerts the power of ten thousand men, working with muscle alone, and, aided by a handful of women, boys and girls, clothes a city.  A half dozen men in the engine room of an ocean steamer, with a hundred strong laborers in the boiler room and on deck, transports colonies and makes new nations, brings separated peoples together, unites countries on opposite sides of the globe, brings about easy exchanges between pole and equator.  One man on the footboard of the locomotive, one man shoveling into the furnaces the black powder that incloses the energy stored in early geological ages, a half dozen men mounted on the long train of following vehicles, combine to bring to the mill girl in Massachusetts, the miner in Pennsylvania, the sewing woman, and the wealthy merchant, her neighbor in New York, the flour made in Minnesota from the grain harvested a few weeks earlier in Dakota.  All the world is served faithfully and efficiently by this unimaginable power, this product of the brain of the inventor, protected by the law, stimulated and aided by the capital that it has itself almost alone produced.