How much more numerous and better roads, vehicles, buildings for the poor, improved culture, tools, larger areas of recovered lands, new fertilisers, new and numerous schools--innumerable details of improvement--had the intellect, time and money directed to these roads been directed to the many needs of a people! The good, then, is rather the good which activity of brain and outlay of money naturally effect--possibly that activity and expense have not been most usefully employed in Iron-roads--indeed, very probably _not_ to the good effect of a more naturally ordered expenditure. But the English, seeing the _effect_ of a prodigious activity and employment of money spread over many years, place it to the credit of a _thing_--STEAM; never considering at all whether the thing has been necessarily the cause, or only the accident. To what effect, during the same time, might that same energy and money have been applied! The new power stimulated energy, and possibly misled it. It may be said that steam did its service by giving this stimulus. Probably not so. The question is, Has Steam after all _misled_--fallen short, in fact, of those effects which the usual and less novel forces would have produced? This is an unanswered question. In the industrial arts the English are not remarkable. They are good in fire-arms and curious in weapons, as may be expected. They are expert in making barrels and vessels to hold liquors from wood; _need_, which they call the mother of invention, made this art a necessity; such is the prodigious quantity of _beer_ which they consume. In dress-fabrics, in tools, in furniture, in metals, they show no more skill than our artisans, and in many articles not so much. We have arts, useful and beautiful, unknown to the Barbarians; they have things of mere show and luxury for which we have no use. In what is called _Fine Art_--that is Painting and Sculpture, particularly--we have but little to compare. By _Fine Art_ is meant what is impossible to us; it is for the most part intolerable to us. Think of the Illustrious of our Flowery Kingdom crowding into Halls, glittering with gilt and showy colours, to see there, arranged upon the walls and standing upon marble tables, great pictures of women and of men, often naked or nearly naked--wholly nude figures, mostly of women, in all attitudes, carved from marble, or made of a fine baked clay! Not only so; but the illustrious mothers, wives, daughters, and female friends, accompanying the men to the spectacle! The young man and the young woman together gazing upon the nude and flesh-tinted voluptuous female, glowing in the picture! No; we give no such encouragement to fine Art! Yet our painters compare favourably with those of the Barbarians, in such proper use of the Art as is allowed by us.