d for, and most required. There is
not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each
new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive
picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been
done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied.
It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be
extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing
but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of
the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of
intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention
could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the
constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable,
and what we are to obtain as illimitable.

We come now to another suggestive characteristic of the time,--another
of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and
strength,--making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It
has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on with
breathless _rapidity_. The reason is, that, the farther it has gone, the
more it has multiplied its agents. The present generation is not only
carried forward, but is excited in every quarter. The activity and
versatility of the intellect would appear to be inexhaustible. Instead
of getting overstrained, or becoming lethargic, it never was so
powerful, never had so many resources, never was so wide-awake. Men
are busy turning over every stone in their way, in the hope of finding
something new. Nothing would seem too small for human attention, nothing
too great for human undertaking. The government Patent-Office, with
its countless chambers, is not so large a museum of inventions as the
capacious brain of to-day.

One man is engrossed over an apple-parer; another snatches the needle
from the weary fingers of the seamstress, and offers her in return the
sewing-machine. That man yonder has turned himself into an armory, and
he brings out the deadliest instrument he can produce, something perhaps
that can shoot you at sight, even though you be a speck in the horizon.
His next-door neighbor is an iron workshop, and is forging an armor of
proof for a vessel of war, from which the mightiest balls shall bound
as lightly as the arrows from an old-time breastplate. There is another
searching for that new motive power which shall keep pace wit