Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/483

suppressing conflicts was partly that of preventing hindrance to the king's wars, and partly that of asserting his authority. Administration of justice, as we know it, grew up incidentally; and began with bribing the ruling man to interfere on behalf of the complainant. Not wishes for the public weal, but wishes for private profit and power, originated the regulative organizations of societies. So has it been, too, with their industrial organizations. Acts of barter between primitive men were not prompted by thoughts of benefits to Humanity, to be eventually achieved by division of labor. When, as among various peoples, on occasions of assembling to make sacrifices at sacred places, some of the devotees took with them commodities likely to be wanted by others who would be there, and from whom needful supplies could be got in exchange, they never dreamed that they were making the first steps toward establishment of fairs, and eventually of markets: purely selfish desires prompted them. Nor on the part of the peddlers who, supplying themselves wholesale at these gatherings, traveled about selling retail, was there any beneficent intention of initiating that vast and elaborate distributing system which now exists. Neither they nor any men of their time had imagined such a system. And the like holds of improved arts, of inventions, and, in large measure, of discoveries. It was not philanthropy which prompted the clearing of wild lands for the purpose of growing food; it was not philanthropy which little by little improved the breeds of animals, and adapted them to human use; it was not philanthropy which in the course of time changed the primitive plow into the finished modern plow. Wishes for private satisfactions were the exclusive stimuli. The successive patents taken out by Watt, and his lawsuits in defense of them, show that though he doubtless foresaw some of the benefits which the steam-engine would confer on mankind, yet foresight of these was not the prime mover of his acts. The long concealment of the method of fluxions by Newton, as well as the Newton-Leibnitz controversy which subsequently arose, show us that while there was perception of the benefits to science, and indirectly to Humanity, from the discoveries made by these mathematicians, yet that desires to confer these benefits were secondary to other desires—largely the love of scientific exploration itself, and, in a considerable degree, "the last infirmity of noble minds." Nor has it been otherwise with literature. Entirely dissenting, though I do, from the dictum of Johnson, that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," and knowing perfectly well that many books have been written by others than "blockheads," not only without expectation of profit, but with the certainty of loss; yet I hold it clear that the majority of authors do not differ from other men to the extent that the desire to confer public benefit predominates over the desire to reap private benefit; in the shape of satisfied ambition if not in the shape of pecuniary return. And it is the same with the delights given to mankind by artis-