The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, March 1885Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Science
The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, March 1885
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
It is most natural for every thoughtful person to ask, how is this and
why? The ready and superficial answer is that “Necessity is the mother
of invention,” and that the American people, by the conditions of life
surrounding them, have been compelled to invent. But surely such an
answer can not be considered satisfactory. There are two events in modern
times that no philosopher, physicist, ethnologist or theologian has up to
this time fully measured, and much less has been able to estimate their
relation to the future of humanity. The first of these events is the vast
migration of the peoples of the Old World to the New, by which, within
the last sixty years 12,000,000 of human beings, most of them young men
and women, have left Europe to make their homes in the United States.
God only knows the importance and significance of this movement. The
second marvelous event of these days in which we live is the sweep and
triumph of invention. It is worth considering that the steam power of the
United States represents more than the entire muscular force of all the
able-bodied men in the world. And the improvements in machinery represent
immeasurable conquests of mind in the realm of matter. It does not take
omniscience to apprehend, to some extent, the fact that these things must
affect the destiny of the whole family of mankind. With such thoughts as
these in mind one walks amid these minute or ponderous contrivances for
the application of power, with something of the reverence and wonder felt
by Moses when he stood in the presence of the bush that burned but was
not consumed. It is evident that God, the Eternal Ruler of all things, is
in the midst of these “flying wheels.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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