Machinery, in its progress, has doubtless been the origin of terrible calamity; it has made the strong man so much live lumber. But as we cannot go back, and must go on, it is for statesmen and philosophers to prepare for the crisis as surely coming as the morning light. How, when machinery is multiplied--as it will be--a thousandfold? How, when tens of thousand-thousand hands are made idle by the ingenuity of the human mind? How, when, comparatively speaking, there shall be _no_ labour for man? Will the multitude lie down and, unrepining, die? We think not--we are sure not. Then will rise--and already we hear the murmur--a cry, a shout for an adjustment of interests; a shout that, hard as it is, will strike upon the heart of Mammon, and make the spoiler tremble.
We put this question to Sir Robert Peel: if all labour done by man were suddenly performed by machine power, and that power in the possession of some thousand individuals--what would be the cry of the rest of the race? Would not the shout be, "Share, share"?
The steam-engine, despite of themselves, must and will carry statesmen back to first principles. As it is, machinery is a fiend to the poor; the time will come when it will be a beneficent angel.
On the second occasion, in May, 1844, the note struck in the last sentence is sounded more hopefully. In a fantasy entitled "The May Day of Steam," the writer notes the passing of the old May Day and foreshadows Labour's appropriation of that festival; and a speech is put into the mouth of a working man prophesying the ultimate unmitigated good of invention, though its first operation created great inequality and caused misery to the hand-worker. But for the most part _Punch_ is concerned with the dangers and discomforts of the new method of locomotion and the wild speculation to which it gave rise. Railway directors were to him anathema. In his first volume _Punch_ sturdily declares that "the best thing to do for poor Earth to protect her Would be to hang daily a railway director," and of his many railway cartoons perhaps the most effective is that which represents a director sitting on the front buffers of an engine as the best remedy for collisions. The "Impudence of Steam" is satirized in some prophetic verses, one couplet of which is still often quoted:--