Imagine The Clumsy Carts Of Five
Hundred Years Ago, Being Used To This Hour, And Drawn, As They Used
To
Be, five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn
to death five hundred years ago, as their unhappy
Descendants are
now, in twelve months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel
work! Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block,
according to its size; down it must come, this way. In their
struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind
them, they die frequently upon the spot; and not they alone; for
their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy,
are crushed to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five
hundred years ago, and it must be good now: and a railroad down
one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat
blasphemy.
When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair
of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on it), coming
down, I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke,
to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts--and who faced backwards:
not before him--as the very Devil of true despotism. He had a
great rod in his hand, with an iron point; and when they could
plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no
longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into their bodies, beat it
on their heads, screwed it round and round in their nostrils, got
them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain; repeated all
these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they
stopped again; got them on, once more; forced and goaded them to an
abrupter point of the descent; and when their writhing and
smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the
precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his
head, and gave a great whoop and hallo, as if he had achieved
something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and
blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noontide of his
triumph.
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