Hence it is that all the processes of nature and the contrivances of art are so many lessons or communications to an instructed man; but an uninstructed one walks in the midst of them like a blind man among colors, or a deaf man among sounds. The Romans carried their aqueducts from hill-top to hill-top, on lofty arches erected at immense expenditure of time and money. One idea—that is, a knowledge of the law of the equilibrium of fluids; a knowledge of the fact that water in a tube will rise to the level of the fountain—would have enabled a single individual to do with ease what, without that knowledge, it required the wealth of an empire to accomplish.
It is in ways similar to this—that is, by accomplishing greater results with less means; by creating products at once cheaper, better, and by more expeditious methods; and by doing a vast variety of things otherwise impossible—that the cultivation of mind may be truly said to yield the highest pecuniary requital.
Intelligence is the great money-maker, not by extortion, but by production. There are ten thousand things in every department of life which, if done in season, can be done in a minute, but which, if not seasonably done, will require hours, perhaps days or weeks for their performance. An awakened mind will see and seize the critical juncture; the perceptions of the sluggish one will come too late, if they come at all.
A general culture of the faculties, also, gives versatility of talent, so that, if the customary business of the laborer is superseded by improvements, he can readily betake himself to another kind of employment. But an uncultivated mind is like an automaton, which can do only the thing for which its wheels or springs were made. Brute force expends itself unproductively. It is ignorant of the manner in which Nature works, and hence it can not avail itself of her mighty agencies. Often, indeed, it attempts to oppose Nature. It throws itself across the track where her resistless car is moving. But knowledge enables its possessor to employ her agencies in his own service, and he thereby obtains an amount of power, without fee or reward, which thousands of slaves could not give.
Every man who consumes a single article in whose production or transportation the power of steam is used, has it delivered to him cheaper than he could otherwise have obtained it. Every man who can avail himself of this power in traveling, can perform the business of three days in one, and so far add two hundred per cent. to the length of his life as a business man. What innumerable millions has the invention of the cotton-gin, by Whitney, added, and will continue to add, to the wealth of the world! a part of which is already realized, but vastly the greater part of which is yet to be received, as each successive day draws for an installment which would exhaust the treasury of a nation. The instructed and talented man enters the rich domains of Nature not as an intruder, but, as it were, a proprietor, and makes her riches his own.
Why is it that, so far as the United States are concerned, four fifths of all the improvements, inventions, and discoveries in regard to machinery, to agricultural implements, to superior models in ship-building, and to the manufacture of those refined instruments on which accuracy in scientific observations depends, have originated in New England? I believe no adequate reason can be assigned but the early awakening and training of the power of thought in her children. Improvements, inventions, and discoveries have been made in other states of the Union to an extent commensurate with the progress they have made in perfecting their systems of public instruction, and these improvements will ever keep pace with the attentions which a people bestow upon their common schools.
Mr. Mann remarks that, in conversing with a gentleman who had possessed most extensive opportunities for acquaintance with men of different countries and of all degrees of intellectual development, he observed that he could employ a common immigrant or a slave, and, if he chose, could direct him to shovel a heap of sand from one spot to another, and then back into its former place, and so to and fro through the day; but, added he, neither love nor money would prevail on a New Englander to prosecute a piece of work of which he did not see the utility.
There is scarcely any kind of labor, however simple, pertaining to the farm, to the work-shop, or to domestic employments, and whether performed by male or female, which can be so well done without knowledge in the workman or domestic as with it. It is impossible for an overseer or employer at all times to supply mind to the laborer. In giving directions for the shortest series or train of operations, something will be omitted or misunderstood; and without intelligence in the workman, the omission or mistake will be repeated in the execution.
It is a fact of universal notoriety, that the manufacturing population of England, as a class, work for half, or less than half the wages of our own. The cost of machinery there, also, is about half as much as the cost of the same articles with us; while our capital, when loaned, produces nearly double the rate of English interest; yet against these grand adverse circumstances our manufacturers, with a small per centage of tariff, successfully compete with English capitalists in many branches of manufacturing business. No explanation can be given of this extraordinary fact which does not take into the account the difference of education between the operatives in the two countries.
One of our most careful and successful manufacturers remarks that, on substituting in one of his cotton-mills a better for a poorer educated class of operatives, he was enabled to add twelve or fifteen per cent. to the speed of his machinery, without any increase of damage or danger from the acceleration. How direct and demonstrative the bearing which facts like this have upon the wisdom of our laws respecting the education of children in manufacturing establishments.[41]