ng man.
Hargraves, the inventor of the spinning jenny, was a common artisan.
Crompton, the inventor of the mule jenny, was a working man. How many
hours of the labour of children would do so much for our manufactures as
one of these improvements has done? And in what sort of society are such
improvements most likely to be made? Surely in a society in which the
faculties of the working people are developed by education. How long
will you wait before any negro, working under the lash in Louisiana,
will contrive a better machinery for squeezing the sugar canes?
My honourable friend seems to me, in all his reasonings about the
commercial prosperity of nations, to overlook entirely the chief cause
on which that prosperity depends. What is it, Sir, that makes the great
difference between country and country? Not the exuberance of soil; not
the mildness of climate; not mines, nor havens, nor rivers. These things
are indeed valuable when put to their proper use by human intelligence:
but human intelligence can do much without them; and they without human
intelligence can do nothing. They exist in the highest degree in regions
of which the inhabitants are few, and squalid, and barbarous, and naked,
and starving; while on sterile rocks, amidst unwholesome marshes, and
under inclement skies, may be found immense populations, well fed, well
lodged, well clad, well governed. Nature meant Egypt and Sicily to be
the gardens of the world. They once were so. Is it anything in the earth
or in the air that makes Scotland more prosperous than Egypt, that makes
Holland more prosperous than Sicily? No; it was the Scotchman that made
Scotland; it was the Dutchman that made Holland. Look at North America.
Two centuries ago the sites on which now arise mills, and hotels, and
banks, and colleges, and churches, and the Senate Houses of flourishing
commonwealths, were deserts abandoned to the panther and the bear. What
has made the change? Was it the rich mould, or the redundant rivers? No:
the prairies were as fertile, the Ohio and the Hudson were as broad
and as full then as now. Was the improvement the effect of some great
transfer of capital from the old world to the new? No, the emigrants
generally carried out with them no more than a pittance; but they
carried out the English heart, and head, and arm; and the English heart
and head and arm turned the wilderness into cornfield and orchard, and
the huge trees of the primeval forest into cities a