Let
any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting
contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him
watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates
its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates
its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of
inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway
carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for
perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise
to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand
years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can
be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is
preparing for himself. {6}
"The misery is that man has been blind so long already. In his reliance
upon the use of steam he has been betrayed into increasing and
multiplying. To withdraw steam power suddenly will not have the effect
of reducing us to the state in which we were before its introduction;
there will be a general break-up and time of anarchy such as has never
been known; it will be as though our population were suddenly doubled,
with no additional means of feeding the increased number.
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