town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful
merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack of
hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and the local
gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matches
for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement of the entire
population. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been for
three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning
in 1750 would have found most of the old houses still as he had known
them, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from the
other, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not very
much altered, the ancient familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled
traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, next
perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses
and the protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish
church,--both from the material point of view very little things. A
Rip van Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater
changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of
the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, the
stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, and
suchlike details. The place would have had the same boundaries, the same
broad essential features, would have been still itself in the way that
a man is still himself after he has "filled out" a little and grown a
longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was
destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to
improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people
were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal
in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been
unattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involving
countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength
of horses and men. "Power," all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug
into the veins of the social body.

Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had
calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently,
people found themselves doing things that would have amazed their
ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehi