The idea of machines was not new. Long before the beginning of the Christian era the ancients had produced many wonderful automatic devices; but mechanical knowledge with them was a department of magic. The use of machines was to mystify the multitude. Brazen figures were made to move, dragons to hiss, temple doors to open and close, trees to emit musical sounds, and lamps to trim themselves perpetually by means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons—all acting on sound principles of pneumatics and hydraulics. Much of this ancient technology was lost or forgotten. The European mind rediscovered it gradually in a spirit of scientific curiosity, with no clear economic intention. And, but for a simple practical idea, one that was very slow to come through, the machine no doubt would still be what it anciently was—an object of superstition, the toy of wonder, an accessory of priestcraft. And what an obvious idea it was!—merely to exploit the machine’s slave value. Merely to see an engine as a beast of burden and the loom as a projection of the hand, both instruments of magnified production, to spare the labour of mankind. That moment in which the use of mechanical energy came to be so conceived was one of elemental significance. All the chances of human life were altered, though not as anyone supposed or as they were meant to be. The course of internal evolution requires to be imagined. It is slow beyond perception. It may not be a fact; or, for aught we know, it may be finished in the species. Suddenly man begins to augment himself by an external process. His natural powers become extensible to a degree that makes them original in kind. To his given structure—the weakest among animal structures in proportion to its bulk—he adds an automatic, artificial member, responsive only to his contact, answerable only to his will, uncontrolled by nature, fabulous in its possibilities of strength, variation, and cunning. His use of it in three generations has changed the design of civilization out of recognition. That change alone which sets our time off abruptly from all time before is the fact of potential plenty. We take this for granted as if it were a natural fact, whereas, instead, all the circumstances have been invented. We who are born to the view cannot see it. We cannot imagine what it was like to live in a world where famine was a frequent visitation and all things were scarce. Yet never until now has the human race known what plenty was. Immemorially the word has signified food. See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field the Lord has blessed. God give thee of the dew of the heaven and the fatness of the earth and plenty of wine and corn. The cornucopia, horn of plenty, never contained a fabricated thing—only the fruits of the earth.