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Yet it was Newton who discovered the infinitesimal calculus and the laws of universal gravitation. Yet it was England that produced Shakespeare, the sublimest example of the Creator's handiwork. Yet it was Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood. But now England is entirely given over to business; she has no time to throw away upon inventions.
For that matter, why should England go in for inventing? She has money and a genius for commerce, and, possessing these, can do without inventors, who, as a rule, die in the workhouse, with the satisfaction of knowing that shrewd men of business have made fortunes out of their discoveries.
This has always been so. Even the sublime and Divine Thinker expiated with an ignominious death the invention of a theory which, but for the meddling of speculators, would have insured the happiness of the world. To-day He can contemplate from His celestial throne, the bishops coming out of their palaces in luxurious carriages to go to the House of Lords and vote against the opening of museums on Sundays, or on their way to the Mansion House to feast with the Lord Mayor, who gives better dinners than were to be had in Galilee, I assure you.
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The world is made up of fools and knaves, such was the judgment passed upon mankind by Thomas Carlyle, the great English historian, a rough and dyspeptic philosopher, who himself, however, was neither a knave nor a fool.
This writer, who passed his life in insulting his countrymen one after another, who could make love to his wife by correspondence when she was far away, but who never found an amiable word to say to her when she was near, this same Thomas Carlyle has calumniated the world. Where should we be without the few disinterested heroes who have devoted themselves to the amelioration of their fellow-creatures, and who, in return, have received but poverty and prison, torture and death? The men who have suffered for country, religion, science, liberty; are these Carlyle's fools?