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 anyone can manufacture.
    »Observe a man digging with a spade; his right forearm 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,
civilization 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 civilization 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 ball rolling, and the prospect of advantage keeping it in
motion. In fact, machines are to be regarded as the mode of development by which
human organism is now especially advancing, every past invention being an
addition to the resources of the human body. Even community of limbs is thus
rendered possible to those who have so much community of soul as to own money
enough to pay a railway fare; for a