Food and clothing constitute the primary wants of man. The former grew ready for his use as a natural product of the soil. The latter he had to produce by artificial means to afford that protection which nature failed to provide. Next to agriculture, therefore, man’s early attention was directed to securing a covering for the body. Looking back through the vista of years dimmed by the mists of very remoteness, we find the animal and vegetable kingdoms destined to contribute to his needs. There were the blue flax-fields; cotton-bolls, scattered like powdered snow about the land, coquetting in wanton abandon with winds tempered by an all-wise Power to the shepherd-watched sheep; goats roaming the vale of Cashmere; silk-worms of Ceres, and the grasses of spring, overflowing with allurements of assistance for his adornment. With these essentials has man wrought a mighty miracle. The genius of Industrial Art, awakened by the fascinating influence of Nature, invoked the Goddess of Invention, approaching her temple not with loud acclaim, as marked the herculean strides in other arts and sciences, but modestly, though tenaciously and most effectually. For not more is woman emancipated by the sewing machine than both sexes by the doing away of the spinning-wheel, the household knitter, and hand-worked loom. Not more do electricity and steam power facilitate the various occupations of man than do the many textured fabrics add to his needs.
In all the phases of social life is this industry manifest. If the banquet hall is warmed and lighted by electricity, so, also, is it adorned with tapestries, silken and artistic, napery surpassingly smooth, and laces intricately wrought.
How like a fairy tale reads the evolution of textile progress! Conceptions, infinite in range and variety, alike pleasing to the eye and gratifying to vanity, have been spun, woven, knit, and embroidered, until, standing as we do at the dawn of another century, upon the summit of unparalleled achievements, we ask, “Can the mind conceive, the heart desire, or the hand execute more.”
_President Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa._
The closing years of the nineteenth century, both in Europe and the United States, are characterized by a religious life as phenomenal with respect to development and influence as those of the eighteenth were phenomenal for lethargy and decline. “Never,” says a writer in the North British Review, “has a century risen on England so void of soul and faith as that which opened with Anne (1702), and reached its misty noon beneath the second George (1732–1760),—a dewless night succeeded by a sunless dawn. The Puritans were buried and the Methodists were not born.” In this opinion, all historians and essayists concur.