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 human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of
the past and the present.
By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of
this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?