But when,
after the fall of Rome, it was found that the earth was too fully
peopled and national power too well established for such means of
strength, attention was turned to another source of power in the
cultivation of a people's own resources and increase of its wealth.
Wealth is obtained by the addition of mental power to physical products,
increasing their value for supplying the wants of man. So that attention
to physical comfort and prosperity which was despised by the brave
nations of antiquity, is now the leading object of government: treaties
are made, wars are declared, rebellions break out, not on account of
national glory or right, but in consideration of cotton manufacture,
facilities of commerce, or freedom of trade. Nations as well as men are
absorbed in the same great pursuit, adding mind to matter for production
of wealth.
From this undue attention to physical prosperity spring certain
subordinate causes, which, upon examination, are found to be the exact
_differentia_ of modern times. The characteristics which distinguish our
age from all others are the very ones which have been found so
destructive to preexistent civilizations. The first characteristic of
this kind is the abundance of outward knowledge. In the pursuit of
wealth, the ocean, the desert, the isles of the sea have been ransacked
for commodities to gratify the desires of man, and, in order that nature
may be pliable for the same purpose in the hands of the artisan, its
laws have been studied with the greatest success; the bowels of the
earth, the depths of the air, the prison of the arctic seas, have all
been subject to the same strict scrutiny in this design.
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