We Treat Our Horses, Dogs, Cattle,
And Sheep, On The Whole, With Great Kindness; We Give Them Whatever
Experience Teaches
Us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to
The happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but
also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and
burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It
is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone
were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign
countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly
impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of
human life would be something fearful to contemplate - in like manner
were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even
worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs,
and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for
innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the
machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able
to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the
continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be
ultimately developed, inasmuch as man's interest lies in that
direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire
more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is
true that machinery is even at this present time employed in
begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after
its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony
appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our
feeble and imperfect imagination.
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by
day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily
bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the
energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.
The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come
when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its
inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a
moment question.
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed
against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the
well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no
quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of
the race.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 18 of 27
Words from 9228 to 9734
of 14251