The Conquest of Bread | Page 6

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, scattered through the
globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty

years but ruins.
There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common
property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors,
known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in
the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of
man.
Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase
knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of
scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could
never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of
scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of
past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both
physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all
sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.
The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to
launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world.
But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of
science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for
years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force,
and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of
genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical
forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last
grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because
daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth
century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped,
because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side
with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed
while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized
modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to
embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to
perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered
more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last
the very soul of modern industry.
Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless

nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial
improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers,
who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without
which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that:
every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable
inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and
industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and
practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of
hand, toil of mind and muscle--all work together. Each discovery, each
advance, each increase in the sum of