At such a price national prosperity would be dearly purchased, even if any prosperity which is so purchased were, or could be, stable. Alas! wherefore is it that communities and individuals so seldom keep the even line, though it appears to be plain and straight before them! SIR THOMAS MORE. Because they walk sometimes in mist and darkness, and sometimes giddily and precipitately when the way is clear. But the way is not always plain, nor, when plain, is it always easy. Both men and nations are liable to evils which are the consequence, not of their own errors, but of their position,.. of circumstances in which they find themselves, and over which they have had no control. MONTESINOS. "For he that once hath missed the right way, The further he doth go, the further he doth stray.' SIR THOMAS MORE. Society has its critical periods, and its climacterics; no change, no developement can take place at such seasons without inducing some peculiar and accompanying danger; and at all seasons it is liable to its influenzas and its plagues. This is one of its grand climacterics. Faery Queen. A new principle,..a novum organum has been introduced,.. the most powerful that has ever yet been wielded by man. If it was first Mitrum that governed the world, and then Nitrum, both have had their day,.. gunpowder as well as the triple crown. Steam will govern the world next,..and shake it too before its empire is established. 200 COLLOQUY VIII. STEAM-WAR-PROSPECTS OF EUROPE. "THE ancients," says Dr. Arbuthnot, “had more occasion for mechanics in the art of war, than we have; gunpowder readily producing a force far exceeding all the engines they had contrived for battery. And this, I reckon, has lost us a good occasion of improving our mechanics; the cunning of mankind never exerting itself so much as in their arts of destroying one another." Since Arbuthnot's age the desire of gain has produced greater improvements in mechanics than were ever called forth by the desire of conquest. And yet the great inventions of the world have arisen from a worthier origin than either; they have generally been the work of quiet, unambitious, unworldly men, pursuing some favourite branch of science, patiently, for its own sake. Steam, said I to Sir Thomas when he visited * Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning. me next, has fearfully accelerated a process which was going on already but too fast. Could I contemplate the subject without reference to that Providence which brings about all things in its own good time, I should be tempted to think that the discovery of this mighty power had come to us, like the possession of great and dangerous wealth to a giddy youth, before we knew how to employ it rightly. SIR THOMAS MORE. It is, however, a power which had long been known before it was brought into use for general purposes. In Justinian's reign, the philosopher, Anthemius, employed it in his extraordinary devices for annoying a next-door neighbour, and Pope Silvester made an organ which was worked by it. MONTESINOS. Even at a much later period, extraordinary experiments excited little attention at the time they were made, though they are now looked back upon with wonder, as having anticipated some of the most remarkable discoveries of the present age. A Portugueze ascended in some kind of balloon at Lisbon, more than an hundred years ago. In cases of public display like this, or of public notoriety such as those earlier and more remarkable ones which you have in stanced, we may, with some reason, wonder that no consequences followed,.. that the same age in which the knowledge implied in such experiments was to be found, should not have produced minds capable of pursuing them to some great and useful result. So, too, with regard to the invention of printing: the ancients missed it, though the sepulchral lamps show us that Greek potters imprinted their names upon their ware; and though, among their gallants, it was the custom for an amorist to impress the name of his mistress in the dust, or upon the damp earth, with letters fixed upon his shoe. It is not surprizing that the prism should, for generations, have been given to children as a plaything, and sent out, among other baubles, as a toy for savages, before Newton used it as an instrument of science, because it required an intellect like Newton's to analyse the phenomenon which it presented: but in these cases the application was direct and easy, and to purposes of common and obvious utility. SIR THOMAS MORE. Some discoveries have been the effect of mere chance,..that of glass for example, which has given astronomers the telescope, entomology its animalcular world, old age its second sight, and which contributes to the comfort of every |