ANALOGIES.—n. THE EXHAUST. T HE "Exhaust," uninechanical reader, is the waste
pro. duct of a motor at work. Its quality depends upon the nature of the motive fuel, its quantity upon the speed of the revolutions. It has but two constant characteristics, its absolute uselessness (or, rather, its as yet undiscovered uses) and its danger to its parent should it be either so foul as to clog free working, or so inverted as to smash the mechanism by what is known as "back pressure." Moreover, unless cunningly dissipated, it would be shockingly noisy, unsightly, and unwholesome; it has therefore to be led out into nothingness by concealed conduits called "silencers." Long experience has made engineers quite perfect in all this. In a well-constructed engine the Exhaust is unseen, unheard, unfelt, and unsmelt. Nevertheless, it is there, and a mighty potent factor, too, as you would discover if its escape pipes ever became choked, and your coefficient horse-power, instead of vanishing into invisibility, rushed back whence it came, and fought for mastery, like a crowd in a blazing theatre lobby, with the foot-pounds pressing on behind.
These things are obviously an allegory. It is not only not far-fetched, but actually an irresistible platitude to consider modern life as nothing but an engine working with terrific, speed, with appalling power, with merciless continuity, Its fuel is men and women. Into it they pour in eager myriads, a given measure of power, of work, of production, in each unit of them ; within it, for a second or two, they battle and are buffeted ; out of it they stream, changed in the twinkling of an eye, sadly changed indeed, done for, done with, exhausted, the Exhaust.
Then they seem to disappear. Freels energy fills instan- taneously their office-seats or work-benches ; the work, heavier and more swift, goes forward without them ; they are but a memory, a breath of what was once, for a breath, so vital. But if they are now unseen, it is rather because there is no time nor need to see them than because they are actually in- visible. Nothing vanishes that once has been. The keen eye of the analyst of society marks these bas-beens clearly enough, for all their chemical change. To him they have their definite hues, compositions, properties, and even their definite dangers. As he studies them, he will be apt, perhaps, like most specialists, even to exaggerate their
importance, and to declare that sometimes, instead of being the mere residuum, they may even have something to do with propulsion of the world's work and passion. He will point to the retired stockbroker, financier, ship or mill owner, lounging portly and placid in his gardens, buying orchidi, titles, or works of art, at any rate coming down late to break- fast, and will say that it is this pleasant spectacle which mainly keeps young Jones with his nose to the grindstone, aspiring to a like coda to the wearisome fugue of existence. They will point to General or Admiral Sir A murath Dasnitall, shining with decorations and old port at City or regimental dinners, and will say that these arc the oritiam MOH behind which midshipmen and subalterns press on to battle. Unlike most low views of human nature, this view is almost certainly erroneous. In our experience there is in the minds of the young no envy of those who have taken off the armour, but, instead, a profound pity which often assumes the youthful form of a simulated contempt. Trust the babes and sucklings for the truth. If old Jones, or the old fighting men, took half the pleasure in their retirement that their cubs do in their work they would be happy men. For, alas ! the seventh age is a sorry business. Little but wild regret broods over the grave of the labour of a lifetime ; the autumn fields are only happy to those who know they will see them again in springtime, and far from idle arc the tears which gather to "eyes which look their last." Turn to your work again, boys l The day will come soon enough when, from the top of the bill, you will see the valley road shrinking back into the gathering shades, and you will wish that the tramp which seemed so long had been interminable, or that at least you had perished in the full swing of it. Your stars and medals, your consols, will but seem like milestones, the little tombs of dead miles, monu- ments of that saddest of all things, the past. Blessed aro they who " die with harness on their backs."
But the Exhaust takes other and more formidable shapes. Hark how the main ingresses to London, from Hounslow, Edgware, Ilford, and Kingston, hark how they patter to the footsteps of armies of broken wastrels shuffling in bulging rags back into the heart of civilization, as if the trunk roads were so many doacac gone mad, emptying backwards. There are thou- sands afoot ; on a morning walk you may count a battalion between Hyde Park Corner and Kensington Church, all con- verging from the emptiness without to that within, all starving, all desperate, "all silent, and all damned." Here is the Exhaust in a dangerous form, the foulest " back pressure" accumulating unit by unit of minus power, until "labour" or political troubles, or, who knows, the sound of the enemy at the gates, shall suck them together into a sort of welter of negative force, the force of destruction and undoing. The devil will have little trouble in collecting his army; we could tell him in a, moment where to post his recruiting sergeants. But he knows well enough, better indeed than those whose duty it is to guard the frontiers of society against another irruption by the legions of the lost. But here, perhaps, is not a true example of the Exhaust at all, for it is rather unused than used up power, the excreta of an engine working badly, and so wasting its fuel that " live " charges escape into the air. "Missing fire," it is termed by mechanics, and a few moments of such misfiring near a naked light in a workshop has fre- quently ended by wrecking the factory.
Truer types are to bo found in the long, quiet galleries of the workhouses. Here aro the really finished—men and women arrived at the very end of things, with incapacity even for danger, of all earthly occupations able only to be ill. Cabmen, charwomen, gardeners, navvies—the groat, gaunt buildings which house thorn are the very mausoleums of hard work, of humble work which seems to have written not a wrinkle on the ocean of existence though it has printed a thousand on the brows of its doers.
Death itself is not more blindly unequal or unjust than life. A hundredth part of the strength, toil, and willingness preserved in ruin in this hortus siceus, in luckier hands had made fortunes or moved nations. One man creeps into existence a beggar and quits it pompously for eternity a peer. His twin drops into the abyss in a pauper's shell. Both, perhaps, have put forth the same relative quantity of energy, namely, their all, to reach such piteously separated departure platforms. But there must be worse thought-demons than this flitting about the workhouse wards when the lights are low. What of him who marched into life with the bands playing, who thereafter put forth no energy at all save that required to listen to the strains, who marched out of it again with the music regretfully muffled—what of this brilliant, joyous creature, possibly a pleasant fellow enough (it is the least he can be), possibly a pig in clover with thousands working for him whom ho has never seen, for whom he would not lift a plump finger save to answer their obeisance P Be does not bear thinking of in a numbered bed in a numbered ward. Fortunately he is rarely thought of. Misery distils its own " dull narcotics," soothing the mind to its unhappiness as well as to its insulting pleasures. Here the tea being cold is the nadir of annoyance, an egg for breakfast the apogee of pleasure. The forgetting world is forgotten; it is as afar off as that oncoming world wherein, so promises the visiting parson, prince and pauper shall walk hand in band. Could they but believe this, these miserables, what revenge would they thence derive in musing of the death-bed of the said prince For him what appalling degradation, that step into the infinite; for themselves what stupefying promotion But the lion believes it as little as the lamb. Was it not of Louis XIV., threatened with hell, that it was protested that the Lord would never condemn a personage of such quality P Yes ; anaesthetics were discovered long before Sir James Simpson. They are coeval with pain. Great misery is, after all, a rare thing. Just as a man survives a tremendous current of electricity, from his very inability to resist it, so will he endure untortured both those uttermost shocks of fortune, a living death and the death of life. LINESMAN.
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