hideous mechanical cowan

Is Brother Mackey talking about the internet?

from the Masonic Quarterly Review, Volume 1 Number 1 (opening paragraph of the first article), July 1857, pages 5-6:

“Many well-meaning, but timid, and, if we must say it, narrow-minded members of the fraternity, object with great strenuousness to the freedom with which masonic topics are now discussed in the publications of the order. They imagine that the veil which should conceal our mysteries from the unhallowed gaze of the profane, is too much withdrawn by the modern race of Masonic writers; and that the esoteric doctrines which should be intrusted only to the memories of the craft, and received through oral instruction within the tyled recesses of the lodge, are thus improperly exposed to the public eye and ear. In the diseased imaginations of these good people, the Masonic press assumes the hideous form of a great mechanical cowan…”