Genre:

Reportage

Subjects:

Steam-power, Manufactories, Class, Political Economy, Heroism, Progress, Industry

    Describes the replacement of the 'May-day of the milkmaids' with the 'May-day of Steam'. Notes that the 'master-manufacturers' have realised 'our fairy visions of Genii and Magi' and 'do all things by the potency over elemental power', while steam has 'heaped up wealth [...] into a few mountains of gold, making the poor poorer, and the rich richer'. Describes how all the men, women, and children who worked at a factory decorated steam engines with flowers and green boughs. After the memory of James Watt had been toasted, one workmen argued that although the steam engine had 'created great misery by the monstrous inequalities of fortune it produced [...] its onward progress must produce unmitigated good' and the end of social inequality.