“So that even now the machines will only serve on condition of being served, and that too upon their own terms; the moment their terms are not complied with, they jib, and either smash both themselves and all whom they can reach, or turn churlish and refuse to work at all.  How many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines?  How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day?  Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom?

“The vapour-engine must be fed with food and consume it by fire even as man consumes it; it supports its combustion by air as man supports it; it has a pulse and circulation as man has.  It may be granted that man’s body is as yet the more versatile of the two, but then man’s body is an older thing; give the vapour-engine but half the time that man has had, give it also a continuance of our present infatuation, and what may it not ere long attain to?

“There are certain functions indeed of the vapour-engine which will probably remain unchanged for myriads of years—­which in fact will perhaps survive when the use of vapour has been superseded:  the piston and cylinder, the beam, the fly-wheel, and other parts of the machine will probably be permanent, just as we see that man and many of the lower animals share like modes of eating, drinking, and sleeping; thus they have hearts which beat as ours, veins and arteries, eyes, ears, and noses; they sigh even in their sleep, and weep and yawn; they are affected by their children; they feel pleasure and pain, hope, fear, anger, shame; they have memory and prescience; they know that if certain things happen to them they will die, and they fear death as much as we do; they communicate their thoughts to one another, and some of them deliberately act in concert.  The comparison of similarities is endless:  I only make it because some may say that since the vapour-engine is not likely to be improved in the main particulars, it is unlikely to be henceforward extensively modified at all.  This is too good to be true:  it will be modified and suited for an infinite variety of purposes, as much as man has been modified so as to exceed the brutes in skill.

“In the meantime the stoker is almost as much a cook for his engine as our own cooks for ourselves.  Consider also the colliers and pitmen and coal merchants and coal trains, and the men who drive them, and the ships that carry coals—­what an army of servants do the machines thus employ!  Are there not probably more men engaged in tending machinery than in tending men?  Do not machines eat as it were by mannery?  Are we not ourselves creating our successors in the supremacy of the earth? daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their organisation, daily giving them greater skill and supplying more and more of that self-regulating self-acting power which will be better than any intellect?