The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
What are we going to make? First, we are going to finish up, and
carry out into all desirable species, our great idea of an iron slave,
the illustrious Man Friday of our modern civilization. Whether we
put water, air, or ether into his aorta, as the medium of converting
heat into force, we shall at last have a safe subject, available for
all sorts of drudgery, that will do the work of a man without eating
more than half as much weight of coal as a man eats of bread and meat.
Next, carrying into all departments of human industry, in its
perfect development, this new creature, which has already, as a mere
infant, made so stupendous a change in some of them, we shall make
the human millions all masters, from being nearly all slaves. We
shall make both idleness and poverty nearly impossible. Human labor,
as a general thing, is a positive pleasure only when the hand and
brain work in concert. Hence, the more you increase well-devised and
efficient machinery, which requires and rewards intelligent
oversight and skilful direction, the more you increase the love of
labor. We have already manufacturing communities so well supplied
with tasks for brains and hands, that everybody works, or would do
so but for Circe and her seductive hollow-ware. We are beginning to
push machinery into agriculture, where it will have still greater
scope. With the means we now have, in the enormously increased
production of iron, our almost omnipresent and omnipotent
machine-shops, our railroads leading everywhere, another century, or
perhaps half of it, will see every arable rood of the earth and
every rood that can be made arable, ploughed, sowed, and the crops
harvested by iron horses, iron oxen, or iron men, under the free and
intelligent supervision of people who know how to feed, drive, doctor,
and make the most of them.
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