train is only a seven-leagued foot that five
hundred may own at once.«
    The one serious danger which this writer apprehended was that the machines
would so equalize men's powers, and so lessen the severity of competition, that
many persons of inferior physique would escape detection and transmit their
inferiority to their descendants. He feared that the removal of the present
pressure might cause a degeneracy of the human race, and indeed that the whole
body might become purely rudimentary, the man himself being nothing but soul and
mechanism, an intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action.
    »How greatly,« he wrote, »do we not now live with our external limbs? We
vary our physique with the seasons, with age, with advancing or decreasing
wealth. If it is wet we are furnished with an organ commonly called an umbrella,
and which is designed for the purpose of protecting our clothes or our skins
from the injurious effects of rain. Man has now many extra-corporeal members,
which are of more importance to him than a good deal of his hair, or at any rate
than his whiskers. His memory goes in his pocket-book. He becomes more and more
complex as he grows older; he will then be seen with see-engines, or perhaps
with artificial teeth and hair; if he be a really well-developed specimen of his
race, he will be furnished with a large box upon wheels, two horses, and a
coachman.«
    It was this writer who originated the custom of classifying men by their
horse-power, and who divided them into genera, species, varieties, and
subvarieties, giving them names from the hypothetical language which expressed
the number of limbs which they could command at any moment. He showed that men
became more highly and delicately organized the more nearly they approached the
summit of opulence, and that none but millionaires possessed the full complement
of limbs with which mankind could become incorporate.
    »Those mighty organisms,« he continued, »our leading bankers and merchants,
speak to their congeners through the length and breadth of the land in a second
of time; their rich and subtle souls can defy all material impediment, whereas
the souls of the poor are clogged and hampered by matter, which sticks fast
about them as treacle to the wings of a fly, or as one struggling in a
quicksand; their dull ears must take days or weeks to hear what another would
tell them from a distance, instead of hearing it in a second as is done by the
more highly organized classes. Who shall deny that one who can tack on a