In the Memoirs of Bulstrode Whitlocke, the following anecdote is told as
illustrative of the erroneous notions formerly entertained as to the
Employment of Machinery for purposes of economy. “The advantage of free
competition, and the inexhaustible resources of new inventions,
contrivances, and appliances were,” it is observed by the editor at that
time (1658), “utterly ignored. The Swedish ambassador” (to the court of
Oliver Cromwell) “seems to have had a gleam of the truth, a dawning
consciousness of how desirable it was to economise human labour by
introducing machinery whenever practicable. He told a pleasant story of
the Czar and a Dutchman; and how the latter, observing the boats passing
upon the Volga to be manned with three hundred men in each boat, who, in
a storm and high wind, held the bottom of the sails down with their
hands, offered to the former a mode of manning each boat quite as
efficiently with thirty men instead of the three hundred, by which the
cost of transport would be lessened. But the Emperor called him a knave;
and asked him if a boat that now went with three hundred men should be
brought to go as well with thirty only, how were the other two hundred
and seventy men to get their living?”
Cromwell, it will be remembered, protected by Act of Parliament a
sawmill erected in his time, it is imagined, on the site of the
Belvidere-road, Lambeth; in which locality at this day there is probably
more sawing by machinery than in any other part of England.
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World-Knowledge.
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