to the point where they could assist in reaching the new land, before the latter could really affect the situation. The last hundred years have seen a prodigious advance in the mechanic arts which has made the new land of America and other continents easily available. The use of the new land has reacted upon the old population; it has made food cheap and abundant and this has, as it were, won wider space and given leisure. It has increased capital and thus made it possible to push on inventions; for it must be noticed that no man and no society can push on discovery and invention when the utmost powers are all the time strained to win means of subsistence from day to day; it is only when there is some surplus power already at one's disposal that time can be spent on science and invention, which do nothing for the time being for the support of the worker. The great advance in invention during the last hundred years is itself one consequence of increased social power.
The increase of social power and of capital has far outstripped the growth of population, and the inevitable result, as has already been said, has been to cause a demand for more men. An increase in numbers only increases the power, for the existing resources are by no means exploited to the utmost; more men mean more help, more accomplishment, greater well-being for all.
The United States is the country in which the two great elements of advancing industrial power, the new land and the improvements in the mechanic arts, have combined. It is therefore small marvel "that America marks the highest level not only of material well-being, but of intelligence and happiness, which the race has yet attained." Whether the causes of that fact have been correctly observed or the inferences from it have been correctly drawn, is another question.
