If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our will, and the
laws of them can be read, we infer that all success, and all conceivable
benefit for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, and has its
own sublime economies by which it may be attained. The world is
mathematical, and has no casualty, in all its vast and flowing curve.
Success has no more eccentricity, than the gingham and muslin we weave
in our mills. I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New
England brains, than to go into one of the factories with which we have
lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much
he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and
locomotive, in his own image. But in these, he is forced to leave out
his follies and hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine
is more moral than we. Let a man dare go to a loom, and see if he be
equal to it. Let machine confront machine, and see how they come out.
The world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and the architect
stooped less. In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils
the web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the
girl that wove it, and lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being
shown this, rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning, Mr.
Profitless, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in
the web you weave? A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin,
the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not
conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the
piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more
inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.
III.
WEALTH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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