thraldom of mere
brute-work, or hardening muscular effort. He drills the holes in the
face of the rock at which he is working by means of compressed air or
power conveyed by the electric current; and then he performs the work
of breaking it down by the agency of dynamite or some other high
explosive. Much heavy bodily labour, no doubt, remains to be done by
some classes of workers in mines; but the significance of the march of
improvement is shown by the fact that a larger and larger proportion
of those who work under the surface of the ground, or in ore-reduction
works, consists of men who are gradually being enrolled among the
ranks of the more highly skilled and intelligent workers, whose duty
it is to understand and to superintend pieces of mechanism driven by
mechanical power.

In farming and horticulture the field of labour is not so narrowly
localised as it is in mining. Work representing an expenditure of
hundreds of thousands of pounds may be carried out in mines whose area
does not exceed two or three acres; and it is therefore highly
renumerative to concentrate mechanical power upon such enterprises in
the most up-to-date machinery. But the farmer ranges from side to side
of his wide fields, covering hundreds, or even thousands, of acres
with his operations. He is better situated than the miner in respect
of the economical and healthy application of horse-power, but far
worse in regard to the immediate possibilities of steam-power and
electrically-conducted energy. No one can feed draught stock more
cheaply than he, and no one can secure able-bodied men to work from
sunrise till evening at a lower wage.

Yet the course of industrial evolution, which has made so much
progress in the mine and the factory, must very soon powerfully affect
agriculture. Already, in farming districts contiguous to unlimited
supplies of cheap power from waterfalls, schemes have been set on foot
for the supply of power on co-operative principles to the farmers of
fertile land in America, Germany, France, and Great Britain. One
necessity which will most materially aid in spurring forward the
movement for the distribution of power for rural work is the
requirement of special means for lifting water for irrigation, more
particularly in those places where good land lies very close to the
area that is naturally irrigable, by some scheme already in operation
but just a little too high. Here it is seen at once that power means
fertility