industry to which this system so essentially contributes: seas covered
with vessels, ports resounding with life, profound researches,
scientific inventions, complicated mechanism, canals carried over deep
valleys, and through the bosoms of hills: employment and existence
thus given to innumerable families, and the multiplied comforts and
conveniences of life diffused over the whole community.

_Mr Escot._
You present to me a complicated picture of artificial life, and
require me to admire it. Seas covered with vessels: every one of which
contains two or three tyrants, and from fifty to a thousand slaves,
ignorant, gross, perverted, and active only in mischief. Ports
resounding with life: in other words, with noise and drunkenness, the
mingled din of avarice, intemperance, and prostitution. Profound
researches, scientific inventions: to what end? To contract the sum of
human wants? to teach the art of living on a little? to disseminate
independence, liberty, and health? No; to multiply factitious desires,
to stimulate depraved appetites, to invent unnatural wants, to heap up
incense on the shrine of luxury, and accumulate expedients of selfish
and ruinous profusion. Complicated machinery: behold its blessings.
Twenty years ago, at the door of every cottage sate the good woman
with her spinning-wheel: the children, if not more profitably employed
than in gathering heath and sticks, at least laid in a stock of health
and strength to sustain the labours of maturer years. Where is the
spinning-wheel now, and every simple and insulated occupation of the
industrious cottager? Wherever this boasted machinery is established,
the children of the poor are death-doomed from their cradles. Look for
one moment at midnight into a cotton-mill, amidst the smell of oil,
the smoke of lamps, the rattling of wheels, the dizzy and complicated
motions of diabolical mechanism: contemplate the little human machines