352 SECTION MECHANICS. 



plements which from their very perfection, require but little mind to 

 direct them, and demand only the use of muscle then, although 

 the labour when honestly pursued is still honourable, and therefore to 

 be admired, there comes over one a feeling of fear and of regret that 

 the man is verging towards a mere implement. But when one sees, 

 as I have seen in my time, in England, and as I have seen very 

 recently on the Continent, men earning their living by treading within 

 a cage, to cause it to revolve and thereby to raise weights an occupa- 

 tion demanding no greater exercise of intelligence than that which is 

 sufficient to start, to stop, and to reverse the wheel at the word of 

 command one does indeed regret to find human beings employed in 

 so low an occupation ; an occupation that places them on the level with 

 the turnspit, and one which is most properly meted out in our prisons 

 as a punishment for crime ; accompanied, however, in the instance of 

 the prison, with the degradation that the force exerted shall be entirely 

 wasted in idly turning a fan in the free air ; and thus the prisoner, 

 in addition to the fatigue of his body, undergoes the humiliation of. 

 as he expresses it, " grinding the wind." 



If they played no other part than that of relieving humanity from 

 such tasks as these, Prime-Movers would be machines to be hailed. 



True it is that 'the labourers who were thus relieved would not than!,: 

 their benefactors ; and indeed, so far as the individuals subjected to 

 the change were concerned, they would have cause not to thank them, 

 because those individuals having been taught no other mode of earning 

 a livelihood, and finding the mode they knew set on one side by the 

 employment of a prime-mover, would be at their wits' end for a means 

 of subsistence ; and would be experiencing those miseries which arc 

 caused by a state of transition. But in some way the men of the tran- 

 sition state must be relieved ; and, in the next generation, it no longer 

 being possible to subsist by such wholly unintelligent labour, the 

 energies of their descendants would be devoted to gaining a livelihood 

 by some occupation more worthy of the mind of man. 



Early Prime-Movers, from their comparatively small size, probably 

 did little more than thus relieve humanity, but when we come to con- 

 sider the prime-movers of the present day, by which we are enabled to 

 contain within a single vessel, and to apply to its propulsion 8000 

 ndicated horse-power, or an equivalent of the labour of nearly 50,000 



