When the telegraph machine was first thought of, the words all showed on the outside. When it was improved it became inner and subtle. The messages were read by sound. Everything we have which improves at all improves in the same way. The exterior conception of righteousness of a hundred years ago--namely, that a man must do right because it is his duty--is displaced by the modern one, the morally thorough one--namely, that a man must do right because he likes it--do it from the inside. The more improved righteousness is, the less it shows on the outside. The more modern righteousness is, the more it looks like selfishness, the better the modern world likes it, and the more it counts. On the whole, it is against a thing rather than in its favor, in the twentieth century, that it looks large. Time was when if it had not been known as a matter of fact that Galileo discovered heaven with a glass three feet long, men would have said that it would hardly do to discover heaven with anything less than six hundred feet long. To the ancients, Galileo's instrument, even if it had been practical, would not have been poetic or fitting. To the moderns, however, the fact that Galileo's star-tool was three feet long, that he carried a new heaven about with him in his hands, was half the poetry and wonder of it. Yet it was not so poetic-looking as the six-hundred-foot telescope invented later, which never worked. Nothing could be more impressive than the original substantial R---- typewriter. One felt, every time he touched a letter, as if he must have said a sentence. It was like saying things with pile-drivers. The machine obtruded itself at every point. It flourished its means and ends. It was a gesticulating machine. One commenced every new line with his foot. The same general principle may be seen running alike through machinery and through life. The history of man is traced in water-wheels. The overshot wheel belonged to a period when everything else--religion, literature, and art--was overshot. When, as time passed on, common men began to think, began to think under a little, the Reformation came in--and the undershot wheel, as a matter of course. There is no denying that the overshot wheel is more poetic-looking--it does its work with twelve quarts of water at a time and shows every quart--but it soon develops into the undershot wheel, which shows only the drippings of the water, and the undershot wheel develops into the turbine wheel, which keeps everything out of sight--except its work. The water in the six turbine wheels at Niagara has sixty thousand horses in it, but it is not nearly as impressive and poetic-looking as six turbine wheels' worth of water would be--wasted and going over the Falls.