for the cattle when they are turned in next week.

But if the machine cuts all the grass, the poor mowers will have nothing
to do.

Not so. They are all busy enough elsewhere. There is plenty of other
work to be done, thank God; and wholesomer and easier work than mowing
with a burning sun on their backs, drinking gallons of beer, and getting
first hot and then cold across the loins, till they lay in a store of
lumbago and sciatica, to cripple them in their old age. You delight in
machinery because it is curious: you should delight in it besides because
it does good, and nothing but good, where it is used, according to the
laws of Lady Why, with care, moderation, and mercy, and fair-play between
man and man. For example: just as the mowing-machine saves the mowers,
the threshing-machine saves the threshers from rheumatism and chest
complaints,--which they used to catch in the draught and dust of the
unhealthiest place in the whole parish, which is, the old-fashioned
barn's floor. And so, we may hope, in future years all heavy drudgery
and dirty work will be done more and more by machines, and people will
have more and more chance of keeping themselves clean and healthy, and
more and more time to read, and learn, and think, and be true civilised
men and women, instead of being mere live ploughs, or live manure-carts,
such as I have seen ere now.

A live manure-cart?

Yes, child. If you had seen, as I have seen, in foreign lands, poor
women, haggard, dirty, grown old before their youth was over, toiling up
hill with baskets of foul manure upon their backs, you would have said,
as I have said, "Oh for Madam How to cure that ignorance! Oh for Lady
Why to cure that barbarism! Oh that Madam How would teach them that
machinery must always be cheaper in the long run than human muscles and
nerves! Oh that Lady Why would teach them that a woman is the most
precious thing on earth, and that if she be turned into a beast of
burden, Lady Why--and Madam How likewise--will surely avenge the wrongs
of their human sister!" There, you do not quite know what I mean, and I
do not care that you should. It is good for little folk that big folk
should now and then "talk over their heads," as the saying is, and make
them feel how ignorant they are, and how many solemn and earnest
questions there are in the world on which they must make up their minds
some day, though not yet. But now we will talk about the hay: or rather
do yo