To-day this state of affairs no longer exists. Wages have risen, the hours of labor have decreased, the comfort of the artisan has grown, what were once luxuries beyond his reach have now become necessaries of life. Young children are not permitted to work, and older ones not beyond their strength. With the influences which have brought this about we are not here concerned. Their consideration must be left to a later chapter. It is enough here to state the important development that has taken place. Perhaps the greatest triumph of the nineteenth century has been in the domain of invention. For ages past men have been aiding the work of their hands with the work of their brains. But the progress of invention continued slow and halting, and many tools centuries old were in common use until the nineteenth century dawned. The steam-engine came earlier, and it is this which has stimulated all the rest. A power was given to man enormously greater than that of his hands, and he at once began to devise means of applying it. Several of the important machines used in manufacture were invented before 1800, but it was after that year that the great era of invention began, and words are hardly strong enough to express the marvelous progress which has since taken place. [=The Era of Wonderful Inventions=] To attempt to name all the inventions of the nineteenth century would be like writing a dictionary. Those of great importance might be named by the hundreds; those which have proved epoch-making by the dozens. To manufacture, to agriculture, to commerce, to all fields of human labor, they extend, and their name is legion. Standing on the summit of this century and looking backward, its beginning appears pitifully poor and meager. Around us to-day are hundreds of busy workshops, filled with machinery, pouring out finished products with extraordinary speed, men no longer makers of goods, but waiters upon machines. In the fields the grain is planted and harvested, the grass cut and gathered, the ground ploughed and cultivated, everything done by machines. Looking back for a century, what do we see? Men in the fields with the scythe and the sickle, in the barn with the flail, working the ground with rude old ploughs and harrows, doing a hundred things painfully by hand which now they do easily and rapidly by machines. Verily the rate of progress on the farm has been marvelous. [=The Fate of the Horse and the Sail=]