ave sprung up, and within their
borders all the treasures of industry, science, and art have been
accumulated.

Whole generations, that lived and died in misery, oppressed and
ill-treated by their masters, and worn out by toil, have handed on this
immense inheritance to our century.

For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the
forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and
water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the
sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced
labour, of intolerable toil, of the people's sufferings. Every mile of
railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood.

The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by
the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. The space between
each prop in the underground galleries might be marked as a miner's
grave; and who can tell what each of these graves has cost, in tears, in
privations, in unspeakable wretchedness to the family who depended on
the scanty wage of the worker cut off in his prime by fire-damp,
rock-fall, or flood?

The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms
which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and you find, one
above another, the foundations of streets, of houses, of theatres, of
public buildings. Search into their history and you will see how the
civilization of the town, its industry, its special characteristics,
have slowly grown and ripened through the co-operation of generations of
its inhabitants before it could become what it is to-day. And even
to-day, the value of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has
been created by the accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now
dead and buried, is only maintained by the very presence and labour of
legions of the men who now inhabit that special corner of the globe.
Each of the atoms composing what we call the Wealth of Nations owes its
value to the fact that it is a part of the great whole. What would a
London dockyard or a great Paris warehouse be if they were not situated
in these great centres of international commerce? What would become of
our mines, our factories, our workshops, and our railways, without the
immense quantities of merchandise transported every day by sea and land?

Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on
which we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions