Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/156

 feebler of course in time. The people resigned themselves, and began to feel, above all, that this progressive movement which did not favour them was in the nature of things and inevitable. Steam-power was like a brute-soul. It devoured the young, dismissed the old, and degraded the adult so that he became the rival, as wage-slave, of his wife and child. Under the black pall of the mill-smoke these gloomy thoughts formed and wandered through the vacant minds of myriads.

But the movement that made modern industrial Britain—the projection of the moving power itself and all its organs—did not hesitate, because of the hardships it brought on innocent lives. It paused no more for these causes than does a blizzard or a north wind. It swept on. It swept past, or rather is sweeping past. And now electricity is beginning to displace steam as a motor power.

And electricity has had a different kind of first greeting. No one is angry with it. Everyone is amazed at it. After every new and startling discovery, such as that of the Becquerel Rays, the Röntgen Rays, etc., the public seems to hold its breath, to listen with mystification, with awe, and to expect it knows not what. More than one scientist has remarked this love of mystery that makes many