I am not saying what
we ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect clearness first
what we _are doing_; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of
machine-contriving in this country. And observe its effect on the
national strength. Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty yeomen
ready to join for defence of the land. You get your machine, starve
fifty of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as many more, and for
your national defence against an enemy, you have now, and _can_ have,
only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty; these also now with
minds much alienated from you as their chief,[141] and the rest,
lapidaries or footmen; and a steam plough.

That is one effect of machinery; but at all events, if we have thus lost
in men, we have gained in riches; instead of happy human souls, we have
at least got pictures, china, horses, and are ourselves better off than
we were before. But very often, and in much of our machine-contriving,
even _that_ result does not follow. We are not one whit the richer for
the machine, we only employ it for our amusement. For observe, our
gaining in riches depends on the men who are out of employment
consenting to be starved, or sent out of the country. But suppose they
do not consent passively to be starved, but some of them become
criminals, and have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater cost
than if they were at work, and, others, paupers, rioters, and the like,
then you attain the real outcome of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You
have your hundred men honestly at country work; but you don't like the
sight of human beings in your fields; you like better to see a smoking
kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that pleasure, and you employ your
fifty men in picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving.

By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we are to till the ground. By
hand-labor also to plough the sea; both for food, and in commerce, and
in war: not with floating kettles there neither, but with hempen bridle,
and the winds of heaven in harness. That is the way the power of Greece
rose on her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi in her
blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the North Cape to Sicily:--so,
your own dominion also of the past. Of the past mind you. On the Baltic
and the Nile, your power is already departed. By machinery you would
advance to discovery; by machinery you would carry your commerce;--you
would be engineers instead of sa