The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the
insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the
unworthy takes--these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want
"feeding" (by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of
them as living organism) they will be attended by patient slaves
whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want
for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended
to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their
constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not
be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will
immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine
dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant?

We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we
have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the
machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to
exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his
state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than
he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle,
and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever
experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt
that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals
far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is
reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for
their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower
animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will
not only require our services in the parturition of their young
(which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands), but
also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and
burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It