The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1901-01-02

son; and the closing quarter of the
eighteenth century developed in Amer
lea race of statesmen to whose def
milton of the political rights of men,
whose understanding and evolution of
the principles of a government by the
people, their successors have added
little that is new or Illuminating. Their
task has been rather TO give practical
effec to the principles OF popular gov
eminent as evolved and formulated by
the men who thought and wrote and
Numbered in the forum before the
nineteenth century began. 1t has been
mighty task but, in peace and war,
it has been accomplished with degree
of sue ess v hose extentIand complete
ness Washington and his compatriots,
in their furthest reaches of hope and
prophecy, had not comprised. There
is one glory of the fathers and another
glory of the sons, and the latter is a fit
ting complement of the former.
Steam and electricity, as factors in
material development and progress,
were discoveries of the eighteenth
century, the legacies of Watt and
Stephenson and of Franklin to the
nineteenth. The legatees can never
be cassed with the wicked and sloth-
full servant who hid his lords money in
the earth. Factory chimneys all around
the globe tell to what use and extent
Watts invention has been applied;
continent spanning railways, the cease
less flight of imperial trains like shut
ties in myriad looms, mark the evolu-
ton of Stephenson's crude idea; the
big liners of the Atlantic and the bat
teships of all nations embody the
mighty expansion of the original con-
ception of Morey, him of Vermont, the
Columbus of steam navigation, though
the Americas Vespucius of the Hudson
has gone into history with his name
attached to an application of the
Vermonter's invention.
"Twas Franklin's hand that caught the horse,
But twas harnessed by Professor Morse"
So an old couplet tells of the genesis
of the telegraph, but the vehicle Morse
hitched up, marvel in it's day, was the
one-horse shay of electric development.
A score or more of eminent whips, from
Field, Edison and Tesla, down along a
distinguished roll of names, have been
expanding the team till already it s
something more than chariot of very
magnificent proportions and equipment.
Ocean cables girdle the world and but
strip the sun in his course; man speaks
to his fellowman thousand miles away
and the distinguishing quality and in
donations of the human voice are repro
duced; speech and song and the notes
OF musical instruments are entrapped,
and though dead the orator and
the musician yet live in the phono-
graph; the light of the skies is in
the household by night, and "the land
of the midnight sun" may be every
municipality. from the great metropolis
TO the community among the hills; the
electric railway and the automobile are
everywhere in the land, and industries
hum with the pulsations of the alter
mating current-and the full evolution
of the mysterious agency that Franklin
caught and Morse put to practical SER
vice is still matter of illimitable
prophesy. In no other domain of dis
covery and progress has this remark
able century been 30 distinguished as
in that of electricity.
Of making many inventions there
has been no end. The cotton gin revo-
lutionized the agriculture of the South
and of all cotton growing regions; the
power loom, the spinning jenny and
the sewing machine, the work of the
household and great branches of indus
try; the moving machine, the reaper
end binder, the work of the farmer in
the field and the separator in the dairy;
the typewriter has superseded in many
affairs one of the "three Rs" ma
chinery has been everywhere supplant-
ing hand labor and the inventions of
the human mind and the creations of
the machine shop in every branch of
industry are among the marvels of the
age. They have been the great factors
in the mighty industrial development
of the closing quarter of the century.
While it is true that the progress of
the century has been most remarkable,
surprising the visions of inspiration, in
material and scientific things, and that
the nineteenth century must make
obeisance to some of it's predecessors,
near or remote, in certain specific
branches of human effort or affairs, it
is also pre-eminently true that in no
former period of time have the inalien-
able rights of men in the government
of the world been 30 widely recognized