from the
field to the camp excited some lazy individual to invent a cart, and,
thus, wheels came into use and the doom of humanity as an instinctive
and natural race was sealed.

"While we walked on our own legs we were natural and instinctive
creatures, open to every impression of nature and able to tell the time
without clocks, but when we adopted mechanical methods of progression
we became unnatural and mechanical people, whizzing restlessly and
recklessly from here to yonder, for no purpose save the mere sensual
pleasure of movement, and we are at this date simply debauched by
travel and have shortened the world to less than one-tenth of its
actual size as well as destroying our abilities for simple and rational
enjoyment.

"If we continue using these artificial means of locomotion there is no
doubt that the race will become atrophied in the legs but with
extraordinary results. The spectacle of an egg-shaped humanity
squatting painfully on engines is not a pleasant one to contemplate,
nor is the prospect of a world wherein there will be neither breeches
nor boots good for the moralist or economist to dwell upon.

"In order to conserve the happiness of the world every inventor should
be squashed in the egg, more particularly those having anything to do
with wheels, cogs or levers. The wheel has no counterpart in nature,
and is unthinkable to any but a diseased and curious mind. Man will
never more be happy until he has broken all the machinery he can find
with a hammer, and has then thrown the hammer into the sea; and then he
can, by experiment, become almost as rooted in the earth as a tree or
an artesian well. It is a bad thing to have an indefinite horizon. It
is a good thing to grow knowing one part of the world as thoroughly as
one knows the inside of one's boots. Legs make for nationality,
patriotism, and all the virtues which centre in locality. Wheels make
for diffuseness, imperialisms, cosmopolitanisms. By the use of legs
humanity has stalked into manhood. By the use of wheels we are rapidly
rolling into a race of commercial travellers, touts, gad-abouts, and
members of parliament, folk with the hanging jaws of astonishment, avid
for curios, and with mental, moral and optical indigestion.

"I believe that the Spanyols and Mandibaloes, two Mongol races
inhabiting the countries at the rear of the Great Chow Desert, were the
first people to deal largely with wheels. The men of these nations
were used, whe