Industrial Influences.
The causes which mostly disturbed or accelerated the normal progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great men. In modern times the appearance of great inventions. Printing has secured the intellectual achievements of the past, and furnished a sure guarantee of future progress. Gunpowder and military machinery have rendered the triumph of barbarians impossible. Steam has united nations in the closest bonds. Innumerable mechanical contrivances have given a decisive preponderance to that industrial element which has colored all the developments of our civilization. The leading characteristics of modern societies are in consequence marked out much more by the triumphs of inventive skill than by the sustained energy of moral causes. (“Lecky’s History of European Morals,” vol. 1, p. 126.)
It is not necessary to point in what way the printing press, art, commerce, and science, have promoted the progress of the race. It is so apparent to every intelligent reader that these have been the stepping stones over which we have passed from barbarism to civilization, that amplification is unnecessary.
The splendid results of science are everywhere so manifest that we hardly need refer to them. What transformations the world has undergone through the uses of the steam engine, the spinning jenny, telegraph, ocean cable, railroads, sewing machines, photography, spectrum analysis, and thousands of other useful inventions. We see advancement achieved in free government, free schools, free libraries, free trade, labor reform, prison reform, and reform in the treatment of lunatics, paupers and criminals, and reform seeking to adjust the wrongs perpetrated upon women.
Besides all these improvements there is every indication in the spirit of to-day that we are soon to witness greater improvements, if not radical changes in government; changes affecting capital and labor.