(Opinion) We as a peoples are in intolerable health and spirits once more.
It has not been good times for man since the poor began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly, they trotted on with as little reflection as a mule: the whistling horseman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed.
Now the biped carries a mobile computing machine about his breeches! The half-illuminated beast steals from the science and mathematics, with his magic tools a power to intoxicate his crude brains, he that is just muddlingly awake, now on to perceive that something is wrong in the social system!—what a hellish faculty above gunpowder and indeed a tool mightier than the pen! Still they toil in the dark with their strange electro-chemical gadgets unknown to our forefathers. We are past the iron age, and are high into the fiery age, of computations, of dissemination of knowledge undreamed of by higher man and forbidden by the laws of God and of nature.
Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted; we shall see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There is a mere love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected dolt that was trod into earth, that was nothing, on a sudden chance by damned arts and sciences refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth and their producers in a mass of looting flames! Fire of fools! What a new existence!—what a temptation above Lucifer’s! Would a dolt be any thing but a dolt, if he could resist it? How he must grin, and shake his empty noodle in the clouds, the Vulcanian Epicure! Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, to not burn the world? There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite?
(Note: Charles Lyon is a State Corporate liaison employee, as per legal code HR-167 -ed.)