WELFARE OF THE WORKING CLASSES. 407 
stone; its volume and its weight can be easily calculated ; 
its weight has been found to be about 5,900,000 kilograms 
(nearly 5000 tons). 
To elevate this weight to thirty-eight metres, which is 
the pyramid’s centre of gravity, it would require to burn 
8,244 hectolitres of coal (cubic metres). Our neigh- 
bours have some foundries where they consume this 
quantity every week. 
MACHINES CONSIDERED RELATIVE TO THEIR EFFECT 
ON THE WELFARE OF THE WORKING CLASSES.* 
Many persons, without doubting the genius of Watt, 
look on the inventions for which the world is indebted to 
him, and on the impulse that they have given to indus- 
trial labours, as a social misfortune. If we believed 
them, the adoption of each new machine inevitably adds 
to the troubles and miseries of labourers. ‘Those won- 
* In writing this chapter it seemed to me that I might unscrupu- 
Jously avail myself of many documents that I had collected, either in 
various conversations with my friend Lord Brougham, or works that 
he himself has published, or that have appeared under his patronage. 
If I were to attend to the criticisms that have been printed after the 
reading of this Biography, by trying to combat the opinion that ma- 
chines are injurious to the labouring classes; I should be attacking an 
old prejudice that has no longer any foundation, a mere phantom. I 
would not ask more than to be able to believe it, for then I would very 
willingly suppress all my arguments, bad or good. Unfortunately some 
letters frequently sent me by excellent workmen, either as an acade- 
mician or as a deputy; unfortunately, moreover, the recent and ex- 
professo dissertations of several economists, leave me no doubt as to 
the necessity of still saying, of repeating in every shape, that ma- 
chines have never been the true and permanent cause of the sufferings 
of one of the most numerous and most interesting of the classes of 
society; that their destruction would aggravate the present state of 
things; and that it is by no means in that direction that a remedy 
would be found for the evils which I warmly compassionate. 
