Memorials of the lineage, early life, education and development of the genius of James Watt

250 MEMORIALS OF
munity when it is too late, that, infinitely more than exclusive atten-
tion to its mere material interests, a liberal and fostering care bestowed
on its Public Institutions, educational, literary, and religious, would
have elevated it in wealth as well as in status. An inapt, neglected,
and, as a natural consequence, falling off population, may prove, when
too late for remedy, that the policy was a false and self-destruc-
tive one, which, even for a generation, sacrificed the training of its
youth, who were to be the future administrators of its municipal
affairs, to plans of mere economical and material extension ; — plans,
moreover, which the measures of men trained in more liberal views,
and pursuing a more enlarged and open-handed system of administra-
tion, that does not consider indifferent to it anything whatever of a
scientific, moral, or intellectual kind affecting the interests of its
immense population, might render, within less than a lifetime, worse
than nugatory and vain. Watt knew the natural capabilities of the
place of his birth. He did not seem to think it an impossibility vastly
to improve these to all the ends of successful manufacture and com-
merce, — so as to resist the absorbing influences of far less favoured
localities, which, in his day, were far from even foreshadowing the
rivalry, so formidable, that has since both asserted and maintained
itself. With the eye of a sagacious political economist he detected
the weak point, and sought to convert it into a point of strength.
The education and scientific culture of its youth, he knew, as every
wise administrator of national or of municipal interests now fully
recognises, to be the only real foundation and security for the internal
material prosperity of either a nation or a community ; and in the
measures which he originated, as illustrated in the preceding chapters,
and designed, there is every reason to believe, still more effectively to
supplement, no one can doubt that he contemplated for his native
town a marked advance in intelligence, in relative social position, in
population, and consequently in wealth.