intellectual advantages, be realized or not, we cannot doubt that the
whole movement of humanity from the Renaissance onward has tended in
this direction. To destroy the distinctions, mental and physical, which
nature raises between individuals, and which constitute an actual
hierarchy, will always be impossible. Yet it may happen that in the
future no civilized man will lack the opportunity of being physically
and mentally the best that God has made him.

It remains to speak of the instruments and mechanical inventions which
aided the emancipation of the spirit in the modern age. Discovered over
and over again, and offered at intervals to the human race at various
times and on divers soils, no effective use was made of these material
resources until the fifteenth century. The compass, discovered according
to tradition by Gioja of Naples in 1302, was employed by Columbus for
the voyage to America in 1492. The telescope, known to the Arabians in
the Middle Ages, and described by Roger Bacon in 1250, helped Copernicus
to prove the revolution of the earth in 1530, and Galileo to
substantiate his theory of the planetary system. Printing, after
numerous useless revelations to the world of its resources, became an
art in 1438; and paper, which had long been known to the Chinese, was
first made of cotton in Europe about 1000, and of rags in 1319.
Gunpowder entered into use about 1320. As employed by the Genius of the
Renaissance, each one of these inventions became a lever by means of
which to move the world. Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The
feudal castle, the armor of the Knight and his battle-horse, the prowess
of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry
trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the
canon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory
was delivered to the brain of the general. Printing has established, as
indestructible, all knowledge, and disseminated, as the common property