h divine has made him like a wheel
In that red realm from whence are no returnings."

Rather, of course, would they adopt Carlyle's apostrophe of "Divine
labor, noble, ever fruitful,--the grand, sole miracle of man;" for this
is indeed a city consecrated to thrift,--dedicated, every square rod of
it, to the divinity of work; the gospel of industry preached daily and
hourly from some thirty temples, each huger than the Milan Cathedral or
the Temple of Jeddo, the Mosque of St. Sophia or the Chinese pagoda of a
hundred bells; its mighty sermons uttered by steam and water-power; its
music the everlasting jar of mechanism and the organ-swell of many
waters; scattering the cotton and woollen leaves of its evangel from the
wings of steamboats and rail-cars throughout the land; its thousand
priests and its thousands of priestesses ministering around their
spinning-jenny and powerloom altars, or thronging the long, unshaded
streets in the level light of sunset. After all, it may well be
questioned whether this gospel, according to Poor Richard's Almanac, is
precisely calculated for the redemption of humanity. Labor, graduated
to man's simple wants, necessities, and unperverted tastes, is doubtless
well; but all beyond this is weariness to flesh and spirit. Every web
which falls from these restless looms has a history more or less
connected with sin and suffering, beginning with slavery and ending
with overwork and premature death.

A few years ago, while travelling in Pennsylvania, I encountered a
small, dusky-browed German of the name of Etzler. He was possessed by a
belief that the world was to be restored to its paradisiacal state by
the sole agency of mechanics, and that he had himself discovered the
means of bringing about this very desirable consummation. His whole
mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery; wheel within
wheel; plans of hugest mechanism; Brobdignagian steam-engines; Niagaras
of water-power; wind-mills with "sail-broad vans," like those of Satan
in chaos, by the proper application of which every valley was to be
exalted and every hill laid low; old forests seized by their shaggy tops
and uprooted; old morasses drained; the tropics made cool; the eternal
ices melted around the poles; the ocean itself covered with artificial
islands, blossoming gardens of the blessed, rocking gently on the bosom
of the deep. Give him "three hundred thousand dollars and ten years'
time," and he woul