CONCLUSION
It is a very interesting question, why was this great development of material prosperity delayed so late? Why did it wait until the nineteenth century, and then all at once increase with such rapid strides?
It was not until modern times that the reign of law was greatly extended, and men were insured the product of their labors.
Then came the union of scientists, inventors, and engineers.
So long as these three classes worked separately but little was done. There was an antagonism between them. Ancient writers went so far as to say that the invention of the arch and of the potter’s wheel were beneath the dignity of a philosopher.
One of the first great men to take a different view was Francis Bacon. Macaulay, in his famous essay, quotes him as saying: “Philosophy is the relief of man’s estate, and the endowment of the human race with new powers; increasing their pleasures and mitigating their sufferings.” These noble words seem to anticipate the famous definition of civil engineering, embodied by Telford in the charter of the British Institution of Civil Engineers: “Engineering is the art of controlling the great powers of nature for the use and convenience of man.”
The seed sown by Bacon was long in producing fruit. Until the laws of nature were better known, there could be no practical application of them. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a great intellectual revival took place. In literature appeared Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Goethe. In pure science there came Laplace, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Linnæus, Berzelius, Priestley, Count Rumford, James Watt, and Dr. Franklin. The last three were among the earliest to bring about a union of pure and applied science. Franklin immediately applied his discovery that frictional electricity and lightning were the same to the protection of buildings by lightning-rods. Count Rumford (whose experiments on the conversion of power into heat led to the discovery of the conservatism of energy) spent a long life in contriving useful inventions.
James Watt, one of the few men who have united in themselves knowledge of abstract science, great inventive faculties, and rare mechanical skill, changed the steam-engine from a worthless rattletrap into the most useful machine ever invented by man. To do this he first discovered the science of thermodynamics, then invented the necessary appliances, and finally constructed them with his own hands. He was a very exceptional man. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were few engineers who had received any scientific education. Most of them worked by their constructive instincts, like beavers, or from experience only. It took a lifetime to educate such an engineer, and few became eminent until they were old men.
Now there is in the profession a great army of young men, most of them graduates of technical schools, good mathematicians, and well versed in the art of experimenting. The experiments of undergraduates on cements, concrete, the flow of water, the impact of metals, and the steam-engine, have added much to the general stock of knowledge.
One of the present causes of progress is that all discoveries are published at once in technical journals and in the daily press. The publication of descriptive indexes of all scientific and engineering articles as fast as they appear is another modern contrivance.
Formerly scientific discoveries were concealed by cryptograms, printed in a dead language, and hidden in the archives of learned societies. Even so late as 1821 Oersted published his discovery of the uniformity of electricity and magnetism in Latin.
Engineering works could have been designed and useful inventions made, but they could not have been carried out without combination. Corporate organization collects the small savings of many into great sums through savings-banks, life insurance companies, etc., and uses this concentrated capital to construct the vast works of our days. This could not continue unless fair dividends were paid. Everything now has to be designed so as to pay. Time, labor, and material must be saved, and he ranks highest who can best do this. Invention has been encouraged by liberal patent laws, which secure to the inventor property in his ideas at a moderate cost.
Combination, organization, and scientific discovery, inventive ability, and engineering skill are now united.
It may be said that we have gathered together all the inventions of the nineteenth century and called them works of engineering. This is not so. Engineering covers much more than invention. It includes all works of sufficient size and intricacy to require men trained in the knowledge of the physical conditions which govern the mechanical application of the laws of nature. First comes scientific discovery, then invention, and lastly engineering. Faraday and Henry discovered the electrical laws which led to the invention of the dynamo, which was perfected by many minds. Engineering built such works as those at Niagara Falls to make it useful.
An ignorant man may invent a safety-pin, but he cannot build the Brooklyn Bridge.
The engineer-in-chief commands an army of experts, as without specialization little can be done. His is the comprehensive design, for which he alone is responsible.
Such is the evolution of engineering, which began as a craft and has ended as a profession.
In past times, civilization depended upon military engineering. Warriors at first used only the weapons of the hand. Then came military engineering, applied both to attack and defence, and culminating in the invention of gunpowder. The civilization of to-day depends greatly upon civil engineering, as we have tried to show. It has changed the face of the world and brought all men nearer together. It has improved the condition of man by sanitary appliances and lowering the cost of food. It has shown that through machinery the workman is better educated, and his wages are increased, while the profits of capital increase also. It has made representative government possible over vast areas of territory, and is democratizing the world.
Thoughtful persons have asked, will this new civilization last, or will it go the way of its predecessors? Surely the answer is: all depends on good government, on the stability of law, order, and justice, protecting the rights of all classes. It will continue to grow with the growth of good government, prosper with its prosperity, and perish with its decay.
Thomas C. Clarke.
RELIGION
CATHOLICISM
It is no unnatural curiosity that tempts us to recollect ourselves at the end of a century and consider the gains and losses of three generations, our inheritance from the past, our own administration of the same, and the prospects of our descendants. Religion can only gain from such a survey, for she is a world teacher on so large a scale that all ordinary human methods of comparison and summary are too dwarfed and insufficient for her. Her message is to all humanity; hence only the most universal criteria are rightly applicable to her. It seems to me that that is especially true of the oldest historical form of Christianity, which is Roman Catholicism.
The Roman Church has had a message for all humanity in every age ever since Saint Clement penned his famous epistle to the Corinthians, or Saint Victor caused the Christian world to meet in special councils for the solution of a universal difficulty. It is no mere coincidence that, at the opening of the last century of this mystical and wonderful cycle of two thousand years, the Bishop of Rome should again address the world in tones whose moderation and sympathy recall the temper and the arguments of Saint Clement, his far-away predecessor and disciple of Saint Peter.
The year 1800 was a very disheartening one for Catholicism. It still stood erect and hopeful, but in the midst of a political and social wreckage, the result of a century of scepticism and destructive criticism that acted at last as sparks for an ungovernable popular frenzy, during which the old order appeared to pass away forever and a new one was inaugurated with every manifestation of joy. The tree of political liberty was everywhere planted, and the peoples of Europe promised themselves a life of unalloyed comfort for all future time. Catholicism was the religion of the majority of these people, and was cunningly obliged to bear the brunt of all their complaints, justified and unjustifiable; although the authorities of Catholicism had long protested against many of the gravest abuses of the period, sustained in formal defiance of the principles and institutions of the Catholic religion. The new Cæsar threatened to be more terrible to the independence of religion than any ancient one, and the revenues and establishments by which Catholicism had kept up its public standing and earned the esteem and gratitude of the people were swept away or quasi ruined.
All the acquired charges and duties of the past were left to the Catholic religion; yet the means to carry them on were taken away, sometimes by open violence, sometimes by insidious measures, but always by gross injustice. The final incidence of this injustice was on the common people, since the Church was, after all, only the administrator of very much that she was thus dispossessed of.
With this overturning of all the conditions of Catholic life came new problems, new trials, and a period of indefinite, uncertain circumstances that were finally set at rest only at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, by which an end was put to the political changes that began with the Revolution of 1789.
The modus vivendi then reached, and soon consecrated by a series of concordats, has remained substantially the basis of the dealings of Catholicism with the governments of the Old World. Only one formal and permanent violation of this legal situation has taken place, the violent and unjust dispossession of the Holy See by the government of the House of Savoy, in flagrant violation of every title that could be invoked by a legitimate civil power. Elsewhere Catholicism has undergone much suffering, both in the states of the Old World and in the republics of South America. But, the above vital conflict apart, the old century closed with no very acute or intolerable condition of things, although there is much that does not reply to our ideas of fairness and justice.