h regard to my
descendants, and believe it to be one that will be felt so generally that
the country will resolve upon putting an immediate stop to all further
mechanical progress, and upon destroying all improvements that have been
made for the last three hundred years. I would not urge more than this.
We may trust ourselves to deal with those that remain, and though I
should prefer to have seen the destruction include another two hundred
years, I am aware of the necessity for compromising, and would so far
sacrifice my own individual convictions as to be content with three
hundred. Less than this will be insufficient."

This was the conclusion of the attack which led to the destruction of
machinery throughout Erewhon. There was only one serious attempt to
answer it. Its author said that machines were to be regarded as a part
of man's own physical nature, being really nothing but extra-corporeal
limbs. Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all
their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man's are loose, and
lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the
world--some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being
occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary
limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own
limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg
than any one can manufacture.

"Observe a man digging with a spade; his right fore-arm has become
artificially lengthened, and his hand has become a joint. The handle of
the spade is like the knob at the end of the humerus; the shaft is the
additional bone, and the oblong iron plate is the new form of the hand
which enables its possessor to disturb the earth in a way to which his
original hand was unequal. Having thus modified himself, not as other
animals are modified, by circumstances over which they have had not even
the appearance of control, but having, as it were, taken forethought and
added a cubit to his stature, civilisation began to dawn upon the race,
the social good offices, the genial companionship of friends, the art of
unreason, and all those habits of mind which most elevate man above the
lower animals, in the course of time ensued.

"Thus civilisation and mechanical progress advanced hand in hand, each
developing and being developed by the other, the earliest accidental use
of the stick having set the b