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for many years, and is said to have reduced the number of
the inhabitants by one-half. The parties were styled the ma-
chinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have
said already, the latter got the victory, treating their oppo-
nents with such unparalleled severity that they extirpated
every trace of opposition.
The wonder was that they allowed any mechanical appli-
ances to remain in the kingdom, neither do I believe that
they would have done so, had not the Professors of Incon-
sistency and Evasion made a stand against the carrying of
the new principles to their legitimate conclusions. These
Professors, moreover, insisted that during the struggle the
anti-machinists should use every known improvement
in the art of war, and several new weapons, offensive and
defensive, were invented, while it was in progress. I was
surprised at there remaining so many mechanical speci-
mens as are seen in the museums, and at students having
rediscovered their past uses so completely; for at the time
of the revolution the victors wrecked all the more compli-
cated machines, and burned all treatises on mechanics, and
all engineers’ workshops—thus, so they thought, cutting
the mischief out root and branch, at an incalculable cost of
blood and treasure.
Certainly they had not spared their labour, but work of
this description can never be perfectly achieved, and when,
some two hundred years before my arrival, all passion upon
the subject had cooled down, and no one save a lunatic
would have dreamed of reintroducing forbidden inventions,
the subject came to be regarded as a curious antiquarian

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