Various

“ A certain branch of industry, we shall say—agriculture, handloom weaving, anything—is struck with decay, and its followers thrown out of employment. What course do the unfortunates take? They sit down and curse their day; they appeal to the sympathies of their more successful brethren; they lean idly wherever they can find support; and failing this, they starve in a body, or drift into the workhouses. In such circumstances, men seldom think even of the obvious expedient of changing their locality, far less of changing their employment. They are rooted to the soil like a plant ”

“ But in actual life the Robinson Crusoes are few, and the shipwrecked mariners many. The mass of castaways, when they find themselves separated from their kind, their comforts, their necessaries, yield, after a few feeble efforts, or without effort at all, to what is called their fate, and die of cold, or hunger, or despair. These multitudes we take no note of. They pass away from the earth like shadows ”

“ If we glance over a map of London, or, still better, take a resolute series of omnibus-rides or foot-rambles, we shall find ourselves as little able as before to settle the question, 'Where does London end?' That huge mass of small streets and poor houses, comprising the borough of the Tower Hamlets, allows us no rest till we get three miles eastward of St Paul's. ”

“ But if the notched brass could be turned into a ring, and the pendulum be made to count the notches off for itself, round and round again continuously, registering each revolution as it was completed for future reference, the observer would attain the same result without expending any personal trouble about it. It is this magical conversion of brass and iron into almost intelligent counters of the pendulum's vibrations, that the clock-maker effects by his beautiful mechanism. ”

“ Look abroad into ordinary life, and examine the condition of its castaways. One finds himself alone in the crowd of mankind, with wind and tide against him, surrounded by influences like evil spirits, the earth dry and famished under his foot, and the heavens black with thunder above his head. ”

“ We, too, have a prince highly educated in science and in art, who is endeavouring to impress upon his nation the benefits of science. At the same time that the Siamese prince threw off the yellow robe of superstition and ignorance, the prince of this country invited all nations to throw off their robes of prejudice and vanity, and, in his own words, to commence at 'this new starting-point, from which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions.' It was a capital idea to make each nation the judge of its own position, by shewing to what point other states had attained. ”

“ If the labour-market were permanent in its demand, exactly proportioned to the existing numbers, and yet elastic enough to meet the movement of population, this would be an excellent plan; but as it is, it may be doubted whether there is not in a system which restricts the locomotion of the workman, the germ of a great evil, both to the class to which he belongs and to the cause of general progress. ”

“ So enigmatical is this metropolis of ours, that it would be equally true to state that 'London is rapidly increasing in population,' and that 'London is slowly decreasing in population.' The metropolis, as a whole, yearly increases its numbers; but the City, the original London, is less populous now than a century ago, on account of the streets having been widened, and many small dwelling-houses removed, to make way for large commercial establishments, the managers and clerks of which almost all sleep out of London. ”

“ They know likewise that the labour-market is necessarily full of vicissitude, that work of particular kinds is constantly shifting its place, now from one street to another, now from one town to another, now from one province to another. It would seem, therefore, to be their cue, to fit the labourer for the changes that are liable to beset the way of life he has chosen, or into which he has been thrown; to imbue him with the noble Crusoe spirit of adventure and expedient ”

“ The family, therefore, might fail in their experiment, and yet be fully adequate to the struggles of actual emigration.
The humanitarians of the day, though full of a fine Crusoe spirit themselves, seem not to recognise its necessity as a general principle. They draw a distinction that has no existence in nature between the classes they design to benefit and themselves, legislating for their protégés in the fashion of a permanent providence. They know that a very large part of the population must labour with their hands for hire—that this is an indispensable condition of all civilised society. ”

“ All Copenhagen was a city of wo and wailing. Everybody had sustained a loss. Mothers and fathers wept for their brave sons killed, wounded, or prisoners; sisters for their brothers; girls for their lovers; the patriot for his poor conquered country and his slaughtered countrymen. Tremendous, in our estimation, was the moral responsibility of the English ministry for 'letting slip the dogs of war' for a slight cause—nay, strictly speaking, for no valid cause whatever. ”

“ Even emigration only increases, although to a large extent, the number of Crusoes; and there is still a portion of the people who drift to and fro as helplessly as sea-weed. But at home, the bulk of the people are in this condition; they have no capacity for expedients, which are the stepping-stones of progress. A resolute tradesman, when one thing fails, tries another; when one process is found tedious or expensive, he has recourse to another; and in the same way the whole of society is on the move onward and upward. But the movers are not the mass ”

“ For the sake of familiar [pg 215] illustration, let it be imagined that a man stands at the top of the Monument of London, with two leaden bullets in his hand, each weighing an ounce, and that he drops these together. They go to the earth, because the earth's mass draws them thither; and since the two bodies exactly resemble each other, and start at the same instant upon their descent, they must of course both strike the pavement beneath simultaneously. There can be no reason why one should get down before the other, for the same influence causes the fall of each. ”

“ If the rod of the pendulum be made of varnished or black-leaded wood, an addition of ten degrees of heat will not cause it to lose more than one vibration in a day. But even this small irregularity is too vast for the purposes of precise science, and accordingly ingenuity has been taxed to the utmost to find some means of removing the source of inaccuracy, to invent some plan whereby the pendulum may be made sensitive enough to discover and correct its own varying dimensions as different temperatures are brought to bear upon its material. ”

“ When many particles are united together into one body, they not only, therefore, take to that body many points upon which the earth's attraction can tell, but they also carry to it a like quantity of resistance or inertia, which must be overcome before any given extent of motion can be produced. If the earth's force be but just able to make particle 1 of any body go through 200 inches in a second, it will also be but just able to make particles 2, 3, and 4 do the same ”

“ There is but the same earth to attract, and the same number of particles to be drawn in each case, and therefore the same result must ensue. Each particle still renders its own individual obedience, and makes its own independent fall, although joined cohesively to its neighbours. It is the mass of the attracting body, and not the mass of the attracted body, that determines the velocity with which the latter moves. The greater mass of an attracted body expends its superior power, not in increasing its own rate of motion, but in pulling more energetically against the attracting mass. ”

“ We find that all European nations except England, have accepted this fact as a principle of state, and have founded schools and colleges to train their industrial population in the knowledge of art and science, which are the only true foundations of practical skill in an advanced stage of civilisation. In fact, we in this country have for some years seen this truth, so far as art is involved, and have established Schools of Design; but we have forgotten that art in industry is chiefly used to adorn the productions of science, and have neglected the latter. ”

“ Our firm conviction is, that had England left Denmark to her own honourable instincts, the latter nation would never have given real occasion for an appeal to arms. Even yet more cruel and criminal was the bombardment of the city of Copenhagen itself, only six years subsequently to Nelson's raid—for it was nothing better. But they managed matters fifty years ago in a different manner from what the enlightened spirit of the age would now tolerate. No British ministry of the present day would dare or wish to act as did the ruling sachems in the early part of this century. ”

“ But this hint must be understood as applied to the system in its general, not special application. There can be no doubt of its admirable effect in multitudes of individual cases: what we disapprove of, is the manner in which it addresses itself to the working-class as a body.
That no external circumstances at home, however terrible or desperate, can struggle successfully, except in a small minority of cases, with the spirit of conventionalism and the inert force of habit, is proved by what is passing around us in society. ”

“ The weight does not stand still at once, but its arc of vibration grows imperceptibly less and less, until at last there comes a time when the eye cannot tell whether the body is still moving or in absolute repose.
Now, suppose that a careful and patient observer, aware of the exact length of the suspending-rod of a vibrating pendulum, were to set himself down to count how many beats it would make in a given period, he would thenceforward be able to assign a fixed value to each beat, and would consequently have acquired an invariable standard whereby he might estimate short intervals. ”

“ A metal rod runs up and down under increase and diminution of heat, as certainly as the thread of mercury in the tube of the thermometer does. A hot day, therefore, lengthens the metallic suspending-rod of a pendulum, and carries the centre of its weight to a greater distance from the point of suspension. By this means, the period of each vibration is of necessity lengthened. An increase of temperature to the extent of ten of Fahrenheit's degrees, will make a second's pendulum with a brass rod lose five vibrations in a day. ”

“ The instrument that has been designated by the learned name of pendulum, is simply a weight of this description placed on the end of a metallic or wooden rod, and hung up in such a way that free sideways motion is permitted. This freedom of motion is generally attained by fixing the top of the rod to a piece of thin, highly elastic steel. A pendulum fitted up after this fashion, will continue in motion, if once started, for many hours. It only stops at last, because the air opposes a slight resistance to its passage, and because the suspending spring is imperfectly elastic. ”

“ We have as little sympathy with those who pretend to account for everything, and would solve all mysteries by natural causes, as with those who yield implicit belief, and run after every new thing. If such powers are illusive—in their operations they are certainly not always so—and the illusion be mental; if faith be all that is needed, that strong faith which, if able on the one hand to remove mountains, on the other, causes scales to grow on the eyes of the mind, so that a man loses his identity, and is blindly led about by the will of another ”

“ Let us, by all means, continue to pity the victims, whether we find their bones bleaching in the desert, or stirred on the shore by the tide; but it may be suspected that we ought to pity them less for the hardness of their fate than for the weakness which could not withstand it. A French writer has finely said, that history is the struggle of the human race with destiny. Even so, we think, is the history of individuals. ”

“ The weight on the shortest string in reality makes three vibrations, and the weight on the string that is next to this in length makes two vibrations, while the weight on the longest string is occupied about one; and the differences would be as 9, 4, and 1, instead of as 3, 2, 1, but that the weights moving in the longer arcs benefit most from acceleration of velocity. Although all the vibrating bodies begin to move at equal rates, they pass the central positions directly beneath their points of suspension at unequal ones. ”

“ When a reader, therefore, is told of the vast increase of population in London, let him sober down his astonishment until he knows which (among half-a-dozen different Londons) is the one alluded to. As 'our own country' may be taken to mean England only, or England and Wales, or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or the British Empire, in five different degrees of largeness, so may 'our metropolis' have at least as many significations. Tables of metropolitan population have been issued in the following form:—1750, 676,250 ”

“ The train of wheel-work in a clock, therefore, serves two purposes—it records the number of beats which the pendulum makes, and it keeps that body moving when once started. As far as the activity of the pendulum is concerned, the wheel-work is a recording power, and a preserving power, but not an originating power. If there were no air, and no friction in the apparatus of suspension, the pendulum would continue to go as well without the wheel-work as with it. ”

“ The reader will now, of course, see that what is true of the motion of free bodies, must also be true of the motion of suspended ones, since the same terrestrial attraction causes both. There is no reason why the two-pound weight in the experiment should vibrate quicker than the one-pound weight, just as there is no reason why a two-ounce bullet should fall quicker than a one-ounce bullet. Here, also, there are only the same number of terrestrial particles to act upon each separate particle of the two unequal weights. ”