s well to review the progress made in estimating life--to impress
our minds with its existence as a reality; because mind and enterprize
just now tend so strongly to the material and mechanical, that we might
be tempted to doubt, whether any other improvement were to be thought
of. If so, we might well enough stop where we are. But we shall
contemplate with most satisfaction our multiplied facilities for
manufacturing, transportation, fertilizing the earth, and conveying
intelligence, if we see in the whole a store, from which we may draw
with good effect for promoting general welfare, whenever the true end
of these means shall be earnestly studied. Otherwise the discovery,
how to make two kernels of corn grow where one grew before, would all
redound to the tyranny of fashion, and only foreshadow an increase of
artificial wants, quite up to the increased supply; so that want would
still be as close treading on our heels as ever.

But if we yet scarce attain to longer life, better health, or more
content, than fell to the lot of our fathers, with their simpler arts
and manner, because we are forgetting to discriminate between true and
false wants--between real and imaginary happiness: the true voice of
history still is, not that the material means must always thus fall
short of their legitimate end; but that, though the material and the
mechanical travel first and fastest, the moral and the spiritual are
following after. These in due time will reveal the meaning and the
value of our stored acquisitions.

Dr. Franklin calculated, that the labor of all for three or four hours
a day, would furnish all the necessaries and all the conveniences of
life; supposing men freed from the exactions of an arbitrary fashion.
If he was near correctness, his time must be abundant in our day, when
the productiveness of machinery, and skill in the arts, are so much
improved. Then it is within existing possibilities, that every mind be
thoroughly cultivated; and every body taxed for labor, only to the
extent required by the conditions of its own best vigor and that of the
inhabiting mind. So far afield from truth is the common supposition,
that the many can receive but the elements of learning; while the few
must sacrifice bodily vigor to excessive intellectual cultivation.
Connect with this thought that before advanced of the irresistible
tendencies of our intellectual life to one average; and what a
boundless vista, in the directio