We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the
exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle
but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men,
there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the
Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered
down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.
But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of
our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb
forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our
forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery
on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our
fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature
what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in
looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence
of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they
stood in the presence of God--and they do.
The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes
it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa
has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.
Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All
the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and
gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And
yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated,
molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the
whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.
The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let
me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of
force on this world of ours.