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Really that place was more tragic than a battlefield." "Why so? I send Josiah for my mail." "Oh, there were three cold-blooded men-machines returning letters. I watched them marking the letters 'not found' 'missing' and so on." "Killed, I suppose or prisoners." "Yes, awful, indeed most sorrowful! Imagine it! Others were forwarding letters heaps of them from men who may be dead.
We have thought we could make diabolically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials of which they are made. We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines. We have let our iron machines assert themselves against us. We have let our iron machines be models for us.
We should have made mince-meat of them all, and perhaps hanged up one or two of them outside the inn as an extra signpost. But we were not only unarmed, we were overmatched, my hearties. There were the Redcoats, burn them! How many times in my life have I been foiled and baffled by those miscreated men-machines in scarlet blanketing!
For sometimes through a word or act, sometimes through a flash of the eye, or a look about the mouth, during the brief interchange of a military salute, these "backward ones" saw that the progressive young officer looked on them, not as men-machines, but as brothers, as important in the great schemes of the nation and the world as he was himself; that he was proud to serve with them, and would be prouder still to help them if he could.
And he divided the labour among two hundred men, who knew no more than the simple rules of arithmetic, whom he assembled in one large building, and there these men-machines worked on, and the tables are now complete. June 9. All is quiet here now, but while we were in the country there have been disturbances. Be assured that, if there is any danger, we shall decamp for Geneva. June 22.
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