"DIABOLUS EX MACHINA." [To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—A
day or two before reading in the Spectator of
September 15th your remarks, on the evils to be apprehended from the practical "shrinkage of the world" through quick travelling, I happened to come across a passage in Mr. Wells's "Tales of Space and Time" in which other dangers are traced to a like locomotory source. The clever romancist supposes himself to have " dipt into the future" more effectually even than the hero of " Looksley Hall," and, thus immersed, to con- template the nineteenth century from the standpoint of the twenty-first :--
"Prominent, if not paramount, among world-changing inven- tions in the history of man is that series of contrivances in
locomotion that began with the railway That these contrivances, together with the device of limited liability joint- stock companies and the supersession of agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would necessarily concen- trate mankind in cities of unparalleled magnitude and work An entire revolution in human life, became, after the event, a thing so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more • clearly -anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to . anticipate the miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have been suggested; and the idea that the moral prohibitions and sanctions, the privileges and concessions, the conception of property and responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly agricultural States of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind."
Fitzjames Stephen satirically declared that when steam travelling began, enthusiasts seemed to expect that railroads would take them up to heaven! An antidote to any such confidence of machine-worshippers is to be found in what may be called the diabolus ex machind views expressed, near thirty years ago, by the author of ." Erewhon." That ingenious
fabulist believed, or affected to believe, that man would gradually fall into dependence on, nay„ into subjection to, his
own inventions ; insomuch that at last, instead of men em- ploying machinery, machines will employ " mannery." If this prophecy does not go beyond the limits Of exaggeration permissible in a satire, then may we say of science what Mark Pattison paradoxically said of religion: it is a good servant, but a bad master. Lord Beaconsfield, when asked by a friend how he liked being in the Upper House, wittily answered : "I am dead, but I am in the Elysian Fields." Let us hope that this may not be a sort of parable suiting our remote descend- ants. Is it, or is it not, possible that a machine-ridden, I had almost said a machine-made, posterity may be content to live on in a comfortable decrepitude after losing all that makes human life worth living,--propter idiom vicendi perdero causes? The late Mr. Pearson, in his "National .Life. and Character," regarded such a lame and impotent. conclusion of human history as quite possible. The mention Of Mr.
Pearson's naane reminds me of his foreboding that the Chinese and Japanese, after what may be termed an,indus- trial as opposed to a military invasion of EnrOpe, will achieve an economic triumph ; in short, that the yellow labourer even in the West 'will- supplant the white labourer. The facts adduced in Our -.sitticle make this foreboding appear less chimerical than it is or was commonly thought to ha—lam.
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