"I would say, for the information of the strangers present here, that in accordance with our custom the subject of this meeting will be debated at the next meeting of the club.This is in order to enable our members to prepare what they may wish to say upon the subject with pen and paper, for we are mainly mechanics and unaccustomed to speaking.We are obliged to write down what we desire to say."Many brief papers were now read, and several offhand speeches made in discussion of the essay read at the last meeting of the club, which had been a laudation, by some visiting professor, of college culture, and the grand results flowing from it to the nation.One of the papers was read by a man approaching middle age, who said he hadn't had a college education, that he had got his education in a printing office, and had graduated from there into the patent office, where he had been a clerk now for a great many years.Then he continued to this effect:
The essayist contrasted the America of to-day with the America of bygone times, and certainly the result is the exhibition of a mighty progress.
But I think he a little overrated the college-culture share in the production of that result.It can no doubt be easily shown that the colleges have contributed the intellectual part of this progress, and that that part is vast; but that the material progress has been immeasurably vaster, I think you will concede.Now I have been looking over a list of inventors--the creators of this amazing material development--and I find that they were not college-bred men.Of course there are exceptions--like Professor Henry of Princeton, the inventor of Mr.Morse's system of telegraphy--but these exceptions are few.It is not overstatement to say that the imagination--stunning material development of this century, the only century worth living in since time itself was invented, is the creation of men not college-bred.We think we see what these inventors have done: no, we see only the visible vast frontage of their work; behind it is their far vaster work, and it is invisible to the careless glance.They have reconstructed this nation--made it over, that is--and metaphorically speaking, have multiplied its numbers almost beyond the power of figures to express.I will explain what I mean.What constitutes the population of a land?.Merely the numberable packages of meat and bones in it called by courtesy men and women? Shall a million ounces of brass and a million ounces of gold be held to be of the same value? Take a truer standard: the measure of a man's contributing capacity to his time and his people--the work he can do--and then number the population of this country to-day, as multiplied by what a man can now do, more than his grandfather could do.By this standard of measurement, this nation, two or three generations ago, consisted of mere cripples, paralytics, dead men, as compared with the men of to-day.In 1840 our population was 17,000,000.By way of rude but striking illustration, let us consider, for argument's sake, that four of these millions consisted of aged people, little children, and other incapables, and that the remaining 13,000,000 were divided and employed as follows:
Now the deductions which I am going to append to these figures may sound extravagant, but they are not.I take them from Miscellaneous Documents No.50, second session 45th Congress, and they are official and trustworthy.To-day, the work of those 2,000,000 cotton-ginners is done by 2,000 men; that of the 6,000,000 stocking-knitters is done by 3,000boys; that of the 2,000,000 thread-spinners is done by 1,000 girls; that of the 500,000 screw makers is done by 500 girls; that of the 400,000reapers, binders, etc., is done by 4,000 boys; that of the 1,000,000 corn shelters is done by 7,500 men; that of the 40,000 weavers is done by 1,200 men; and that of the 1,000 stitchers of shoe soles is done by 6 men.To bunch the figures, 17,900 persons to-day do the above-work, whereas fifty years ago it would have taken thirteen millions of persons to do it.Now then, how many of that ignorant race--our fathers and grandfathers--with their ignorant methods, would it take to do our work to-day? It would take forty thousand millions--a hundred times the swarming population of China-twenty times the present population of the globe.You look around you and you see a nation of sixty millions--apparently; but secreted in their hands and brains, and invisible to your eyes, is the true population of this Republic, and it numbers forty billions! It is the stupendous creation of those humble unlettered, un-college-bred inventors--all honor to their name.
"How grand that is!" said Tracy, as he wended homeward."What a civilization it is, and what prodigious results these are! and brought about almost wholly by common men; not by Oxford-trained aristocrats, but men who stand shoulder to shoulder in the humble ranks of life and earn the bread that they eat.Again, I'm glad I came.I have found a country at last where one may start fair, and breast to breast with his fellow man, rise by his own efforts, and be something in the world and be proud of that something; not be something created by an ancestor three hundred years ago."