Half-Hours with the Best Authors, Including Biographical and Critical Notices, Vol. 1 of 4 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Half-Hours With the Best Authors, Including Biographical and Critical Notices, Vol. 1 of 4

The advantages conferred by the augmentation of our physical resources through the medium of increased knowledge and im proved art have this peculiar and remarkable property - that they are in their nature diffusive, and cannot be enjoyed in any exclu sive manner by a few. An Eastern despot may extort the riches and monopolise the art of his subjects for his own personal use; he may spread around him an unnatural splendour and luxury, and stand in strange and preposterous contrast with the general penury and discomfort of his people he may glitter in jewels of gold and raiment of needlework; but the wonders of well contrived and executed manufacture which we use daily, and the comforts which have been invented, tried, and improved upon by thousands, in every form of domestic convenience, and for every ordinary pur pose of life, can never be enjoyed by him. T o produce a state of things in which the physical advantages of civilised life can exist in a high degree, the stimulus of increasing comforts and constantly-elevated desires must have been felt by millions since it is not in the power of a few individuals to create that wide de mand for useful and ingenious applications, which alone can lead to great and rapid improvements, unless backed by that arising from the speedy diffusion of the same advantages among the mass of mankind.

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