They have never applied chemistry to the commercial manufacture of chemicals.

They have never organised the systems or improved the ships and engines by which food finds its way from the prairies to the cities which would else be starving.

If in some city or district an old industry declines they demand with tears that the thousands thus thrown out of employment shall be set by the state to do or produce something, even though this be a something which is not wanted by anybody.

They never set themselves to devise, as was done in the English Midlands, some new commodity, such as the modern bicycle, which was not only a means of providing the labourers with a maintenance, but was also a notable addition to the wealth of the world at large.

They fail to do these things for the simple reason that they cannot do them; and they cannot do them because they are deficient alike in the interest requisite for understanding how they are done, and in the concentrated practical energy which is no less requisite for the doing of them.
At the end of an address in which I had been dealing with this subject at New York, a young man, one of my hearers, told me that I had been putting into words what had long been borne in on himself by his own studies and observations--the fact, namely, that the social leaders of men are divided into two classes, _those who dream about reforming the industrial business of the world, and those, an opposite type, who alone advance and accomplish it_.