As industrial creatures, we often look like wretched copyists of animals far beneath us in the scale of organization; and we seem to confess as much by the names which we give them. The mason-wasp, the carpenter-bee, the mining caterpillars, the quarrying sea-slugs, execute their work in a way which we cannot rival or excel. The bird is an exquisite architect; the beaver a most skilful bridge-builder; the silk-worm the most beautiful of weavers; the spider the best of net-makers. Each is a perfect craftsman, and each has his tools always at hand.
Those wise creatures, I believe, have minds like our own, to the extent that they have minds, and are not mere living machines, swayed by a blind instinct; but their most wonderful works imply neither invention, contrivance, nor volition, but only a placid, pleasant, easily rendered obedience to instincts which reign without rivals, and justify their despotic rule by the infallible happiness which they secure. It has cost none of these ingenious artists any intellectual effort to learn its craft, for God gave it to each perfect in the beginning; and, within the circle to which they apply, the rules which guide their work are infallible, and know no variation.
To those creatures, however, the Author of all has given, not only infallible rudes for their work, but unfaltering faith in them. Labour is for them not a doubt, but a certainty. Duty is the same thing as happiness. They never grow weary of life, and death never surprises them; and they are less to be likened to us than to perfect self-repairing machines, which swiftly raise our admiration from themselves to Him who made and who sustains them.
We are industrial for other reasons, and in a different way.
Our working instincts are very few; our faith in them still more feeble; and our physical wants far greater than those of any other creature. Indeed, the one half of the Industrial Arts are the result of our being born without clothes; the other half, of our being born without tools.
I do not propose to offer you a catalogue of the arts which our unclothedness compels us to foster. The shivering savage in the colder countries robs the seal and the bear, the buffalo and the deer, of the one mantle which Nature has given them. The wild huntsman, by a swift but simple transmutation, becomes the clothier, the tailor, the tanner, the currier, the leather-dresser, the glover, the saddler, the shoemaker, the①tent-maker. And the tent-maker, the arch-architectof one ofthe great schools of architecture, becomes quickly a house- builder, building with snow where better material is not to be had; and a ship-builder, constructing, out of a few wooden ribs and stretched animal skins, canoes which, as sad experience has shown, may survive where English ships of oak② have gone to destruction.
Again: the unchilled savage of the warmer regions seeks a covering, not from the cold, but from the sun which smites him by day, and the moon which smites him by night. The palm, the banana, the soft-barked trees, the broad-leaved sedges and long-fibred grasses are spoiled by him, as the beasts of the field are by his colder brother. He becomes a sower, a reaper, a spinner, a weaver, a baker, a brewer, a distiller, a dyer, a carpenter; and whilst he is these, he bends the pliant stems of his tropical forests into roof-trees and rafters, and clothes them with leaves, and makes for himself a tabernacle of boughs, and so is the arch-architect of a second great school of architecture; and, by-and-by, his twisted branches and③interlaced leaves grow into Grecian columnswith Corinthianacanthus capitals,④ and Gothic pillars,⑤ with petrified plants⑥ and stony flowers gracefully curling round them.
Once more: in those temperate regions where large animals and trees do not greatly abound, turfs, or mud, or clay, or stones, or all together, can be fashioned into that outermost garment which we call a house, and which we most familiarly connect with the notion of architecture.
It is not, however, his cultivation either of the arts which have been named, or of others, that makes man peculiar as an industrial animal; -it is the mode in which he practises them. The first step he takes towards remedying his nakedness and helplessness, is in a direction in which no other creature has led the way, and none has followed his example. He lays hold of that most powerful of all weapons of peace or war, Fire , from which every other animal, unless when fortified by man"s presence, flees in terror; and with it alone not only clothes himself, but lays the foundation of a hundred arts.
