A Coal-Fired Dream World

Wanting coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand are amply supported.[p.643 →]

— Thomas Huxley, On the Formation of Coal (1870)

[the industrial revolution] introduced a new race of men—the men who work with machinery instead of with their hands, who cluster together in cities instead of spreading over the land in villages and hamlets; the men who trade with those of other nations as readily as with those of their own town; [...] whose market is no longer the city or the country but the world itself.[p.37 →]

— Henry DeBeers Gibbins, Economic and Industrial Progress of the Century, (1903)