The enormous flight of periodical miscellanies, and of newspapers, must be taken as both the indication and the cause that hundreds of thousands of persons were giving some attention to the matters of general information, where their grandfathers had been, during the intervals of time allowed by their employments, prating, brawling, sleeping, or drinking their hours away. [Footnote: Since this was written there has been a prodigious augmentation of all such means of general excitement; and happily a diversified multiplication of a class of them calculated to benefit the inferior people, at once by giving them a new and enlarged range of ideas, and by bringing them on some tracts of common ground with the liberally educated; thus abating the former almost total incapacity, on the part of those inferiors, for intelligent intercommunication.]
It is perhaps an item of some small value in the account, that a new class of ideas was furnished by the many wonderful effects of science, in the application of the elements and mechanical powers. The people saw human intelligence so effectually inspiriting inanimate matter, as to create a new and mighty order of agency, appearing in a certain degree independent of man himself, and in its power immensely surpassing any simple immediate exertion of his power. They saw wood and iron, fire, water, and air, actuated to the production of effects which might vie with what their rude ancestors had been accustomed to believe, (those of them who had heard of such beings,) of giants, magicians, alchymists, and monsters; effects, the dream of which, if any one could so have dreamed, would have been scoffed at by even the more intelligent of the former race.
It is true that very ignorant persons can wonder at such things without deriving much instruction from them; and that much sooner than the more cultivated ones they become so familiarized with them as not to think of them. All effects, however astonishing, are apt, if they are but regular in their recurrence, to become soon insignificant to those who have never learnt to inquire into causes. But still, it would be some little advantage to the people's understanding to see what prodigious effects could be produced without any preternatural interference. Though not comprehending the science employed, they could comprehend that what they saw was purely a matter of science, and that the cause and the effect were natural and definite; unlike the present race of Egyptians, who not long since regarded the very mechanics of an European as an operation of magic; and were capable of suspecting that a machine constructed by a man from England, for raising water from the Nile, should inundate the country in an hour. These wonders of science and art must therefore have contributed somewhat to rid our people of the impression of being at every turn beset by occult powers, under the name perhaps of witchcraft, and to expel the notions of a vague and capricious agency interfering and sporting with events throughout the system around them. Their rationality thus obtained an improvement, which may be set against the injury undoubtedly done them through that diminished exercise of the understanding which accompanied the progressive division of labor; an alteration rendered inevitable, and in other respects so advantageous.
When we come down to a comparatively recent time, we see the Bible "going up on the breadth of the land." In passing by any given number of houses of the inferior class, we may presume there are in them four or five times as many copies of that sacred book as there were in the same number thirty or forty years since. And when we consider how many more persons in those houses can read, and that in some of them the book may be more read for having come there as a novelty, than it is in many others where it has been an old article of the furniture, we may fairly presume that the increased reading is in a greater proportion than the increased number of Bibles.—This late period has also brought into action a new expedient, worthy to stand, in the province of education, parallel and rival to the most useful modern inventions in the mechanical departments; an organization for schools, by which, instead of one or two overlabored agents upon a mass of reluctant subjects, that whole mass itself shall be animated into a system of reciprocal agency. It has all the merit of a contrivance which associates with mental labor a pleasure never known to young learners before.
One more distinction of our times has been, that effect which missionary and other philanthropic societies have had, to render familiar to common knowledge, by means of their meetings and publications, a great number of such interesting and important facts, in the state of other countries and our own, as were formerly quite beyond the sphere of ordinary information.
In aid of all these means at work in the trial to raise the people from the condition in which they had been so many ages sunk and immovable, there has been of late years the unpretending but important ministration of an incessant multifarious inventiveness in making almost every sort of information offer itself in brief, familiar, and attractive forms, adapted to youth or to adult ignorance; so that knowledge, which was formerly a thing to be searched and dug for "as for hid treasures," has seemed at last beginning to effloresce through the surface of the ground on all sides of us.
The statement of what recent times have produced for effecting an alteration among the people, must include the prodigious excitement in the political world. It were absurd, it is true, to name this in the simple character of a cause, when we speak of the rousing of the popular mind from a long stagnation; it being itself a proof and result of some preceding cause beginning to pervade and disturb that stagnation. But whatever may be assigned as the true and sufficient explanation of its origin, we have to look on the mighty operation of its progress, forcing a restlessness, instability, and tendency to change, into almost every part of the social economy. In the whole compass of time there has been no train of events, that has within so short a period stirred to the very bottom the mind of so vast a portion of the race. And the power of this great commotion has less consisted in what may be termed its physical energy, evinced in grand exploits and catastrophes, than in its being an intense activity of principles. It was as different from other convulsions in the moral world, as would be a tempest attributed to the direct intervention of a mighty spirit, whether believed celestial or infernal, from one raised in the elements by mere natural causes. The people were not, as in other instances of battles, revolutions, and striking alternations of fortune, gazing a at mere show of wonderful events, but regarded these events as the course of a great practical debate of questions affecting their own interests.
And now, when we have put all these things together, we may well pause to indulge again our wonder what could have been the mental situation of a majority of the inhabitants of this country, antecedently to this creation and conjunction of so many means and influences for awaking them to something of an intelligent existence.