But to most people who have only seen motor-cars, and have neither driven them nor ridden in one, this will not readily be understood; while the veteran who remembers the sights and sounds of the coaching days does not hear the clatter of the new occupants of the road with pleasurable feelings. To him there is no music in the “Gurr-r-r-_umph_! bang, gr-rrr!” of a Daimler, changing speeds in going uphill, nor any charm in the rattle of a Benz; the “ft-ft-ft” of a motor-tricycle, or the banshee-like minor-key wail, “wow-wow-wow,” of an electric cab on wood pavement. How very odd if there were! [Illustration: THE LAST OF THE “MANCHESTER DEFIANCE.” _From a lithograph._ ] Does it never occur to thinking men that the “blessings” of invention and the age of mechanical and other improvements have been too loudly and consistently praised? We need not be thought fanatically opposed to change if we deny the reality of some of those blessings. Let it be granted that they are ultimately in favour of the community and for the eventual improvement of the race; but if you view him unconventionally, does not the inventor, with his ingenious devices to overturn the practice and habits of generations past, seem sometimes rather a curse than a benefactor to mankind? While with one hand he simplifies and cheapens something (whether it be in travel or in anything else does not particularly matter for argument’s sake), with the other he sets a more strenuous pace to life. In the long ago he invented printing; and the Devil, seeing prophetically ahead, looked on with approval, because he foresaw the halfpenny evening papers. He introduced gas, replaced horses by steam-engines, and away went the leisured pace of that generation; and then, when a newer one was born to take steam as a matter of course, brought electricity to bear upon lighting and tractive problems. Always he sets you a quicker pace when you would be going quietly or resting by the way. One generation of him takes away the traffic of the roads; another filches that of the railways and puts the traffic on the road again in an altered form. There is no finality about the inventor, who ought, for the peace of the age, first to be gently dissuaded, then admonished, and, in the last resort, severely dealt with. Our ancestors had a “quick way” with such, and discouraged invention by putting inventors to death as wizards. A drastic method, but they saved themselves much worry and trouble thereby. The inventor is not usually entitled to any consideration on the score of working for the benefit of humanity. So little does he do so that he takes infinite care to patent and to provisionally protect even his immature devices. He works, in short, to build his own fortune.