LONDON:
Printed by GEORGE E. EYRE and WILLIAM SPOTTISWOODE,
Printers to the Queen's most Excellent Majesty. For Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE.
511
25
tarian materials, so arrange that the public might readily understand their nature, could not but be of signal service. Consider how the case stands at present. No systematic effort is made by our merchants to search the earth for its liberal treasures. The noblest, as men speak, and the vilest of things, gold and guano, are stumbled on by chance, and gathered at haphazard; and this whether they occur at our own door, or at our antipodes. With a kind of mad patience we go submissively year after year to the same cotton-land, and sugar-land, or tea-land. If it shall please Providence to make cotton, sugar, and tea-plants grow elsewhere than in those lands, we of course shall go to the new regions, but we must wait till these are revealed. We are reckless and daring enough in unceasingly scouring strange lands and seas, but of what avail is all this if we only guess at the value of the strange objects which we encounter! Charles Dickens has, however undesignedly, profoundly satirised this folly of ours in his account of Captain Cuttle's endeavour to keep the shop of his friend the philosophical instrument maker. All went well till a customer enquired for a particular instrument. Whether it was one of the many strange pieces of apparatus consigned to his care, the captain did not know. And as his customer,
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...
LONDON:
Printed by GEORGE E. EYRE and WILLIAM SPOTTISWOODE,
Printers to the Queen's most Excellent Majesty. For Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE.
511
25
tarian materials, so arrange that the public might readily understand their nature, could not but be of signal service. Consider how the case stands at present. No systematic effort is made by our mer- chants to search the earth for its liberal treasures. The noblest, as men speak, and the vilest of things, gold and guano, are stumbled on by chance, and gathered at haphazard; and this whether they occur at our own door, or at our antipodes. With a kind of mad patience we go submissively year after year to the same cotton-land, and sugar-land, or tea-land. If it shall please Providence to make cotton, sugar, and tea-plants grow elsewhere than in those lands, we of course shall go to the new regions, but we must wait till these are revealed. We are reckless and daring enough in unceasingly scouring strange lands and seas, but of what avail is all this if we only guess at the value of the strange objects which we en- counter! Charles Dickens has, however undesignedly, profoundly satirised this folly of ours in his account of Captain Cuttle's endeavour to keep the shop of his friend the philosophical instrument maker. All went well till a customer enquired for a parti- cular instrument. Whether it was one of the many strange pieces of apparatus consigned to his care, the captain did not know. And as his customer,
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