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# THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
household, are as certainly divine precepts, as that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that hasting to be rich multiplieth sorrows. There is only the difference that a blessing goes with the first, and a curse with the last. Southey was right. Honestly earned wages are as true a quiddam honorarium, a gracious largesse, as any sum which the lawyer or physician, looking the other way, finds fall into his palm. To know that, by work of brain, or heart, or hand, or rather by all together, you have earned a penny, copper or golden as the case may be, which you may honestly expend on some lawful want, in gratification of some innocent intellectual taste or æsthetical desire, for the carrying out of some moral purpose, or for the comfort of some beloved relative or friend, is one of the truest delights left to us, after the flush of early youth has passed away. It is the frequent custom, I understand, of this Company, as the present Master realizes, to translate its Treasurer, after he has thoroughly learned how wealthy the corporation is, into its Master, so that he may the more liberally care for the widows and orphans of whom, to so large an extent, the Merchant Company is guardian.
It must be a pleasant task.
And the necessity which lies upon every man, high and low, except the uncaught thief, to serve other men, and be paid by them as his taskmasters, is not the least pleasant leaf of that Dulcamara, bitter-sweet, which Adam found growing everywhere beyond the gates of Eden. Honourable service is the only freedom which belongs to man, and the spirit of brotherly interest and sympathy never rises higher than between the noble master and the noble servant.
Secondly, The Museum which I have been commending to you, is not a museum of Scottish industry, but a museum of the industry of the world in relation to Scotland. It cannot be less than this; and as this, it will increase our civilization, and add to our power to civilize the rest of the world. We have deserved well of the other nations of the globe as improvers of the Industrial Arts, but they also have deserved well of us.
Tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium, cinchona, cotton, caoutchouc, gutta percha, guano, have all been bestowed upon us by distant tribes. The Chinese have taught us to weave silk, to make paper and porcelain. Indians have shown us how to dye.
The Venetians have given us the modern art of glass-making. Our soda process is originally a French invention. The improvements introduced into the colonial manufacture of cane-sugar are largely borrowed from
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AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE.
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