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Contents |
BOOK ONE
CROWDS AND MACHINES
CHAPTER III
THE MACHINE SCARE
I HAVE had occasion nearly every day for the past two weeks
to pass by an ancient churchyard on a great hillside not far
from London. Most of the stones are very old, and seem to
have been thoughtfully and reverently, flake by flake, wrought
into their final form by long-vanished hands. As I stand and
watch them, with the yews and cypresses flocking round them,
it is as if in some sort of way they had been surely wrought by
the hand of love, so full are they of grief and of joy, of devotion,
of the very singing of the dead and of those who loved them.
When I walk on a little farther, and come to a small and
new addition to the churchyard, and look about me at the
stones, I find myself suddenly in quite a new company. So
far as one could observe, looking at the gravestones in the
new churchyard, the people who died there died rather thought-
lessly and mechanically, and as if nobody cared very much.
Of course, when one thinks a little further, one knows that this
cannot be true, and that the men and the women who gathered
by these glib, trim, capable-looking modern tombstones were as
full of love and tenderness and reverence before their dead as
the others were—but the lines on the stones give no sign.
One never stops to read an epitaph on one of them; one knows
it would not be interesting, or really whisper to one the
strange, happy, human things of another world—even of
this world, that make the old tombstones such good company
and so friendly to us. One gives a glance at the stone and
passes on. It was made by machinery, apparently; a machine
might have designed it, a machine might have died and been
buried under it. One looks beyond it at all the others like it—[35]
all the glib, competent-looking white stones. Were the silenced
people all machines under them, all mechanical, all made to
a pattern like their stones, like these strangely hard, brief
tombstones standing here at their heads, summing up their
lives before us curtly, heartlessly, on this gentle old hillside?
I wonder.
I looked back to the old eloquent cemetery that almost
seemed to be breathing things, and looked once more at the
new.
And as I stood and thought, they seemed to me to be two
worlds—one the world the people all about me are always
saying sadly is going by, and the other—well, the one we
will have to have.
. . . . . . .
As I look off from the hilltop at the great sloping country-
side about me, which stretches miles and miles, with its green
fields, and bushy treetops, its red roofs, its banners of steam
from twenty railways, its huge, grim, furious chimneys, its
still, sleepy steeples, I also see two worlds, the same two worlds
over again that I saw in the churchyard, except that they are
all jumbled together—the complacent, capable, cut-out, home-
less-looking houses, the little snuggled-down old ones with their
happy trees about them and trails of cooking smoke. I see the
same two worlds standing and facing each other before me
whichever way I turn.
And when I slip out of the churchyard from those two little
separate worlds of the dead, and move slowly down the long
bustling village street, and look into the faces of the living,
the same two worlds that were in the churchyard and on the
hills seem to look at me out of the faces of the living too.
The faces go hurrying past me, worlds apart. Most people,
I imagine, who read these pages must have noticed the people's
faces in the streets nowadays—how they seem to have come
out of separate worlds into the street a moment, and hurry [36]
past, and seem to be going back in a moment more to separate
worlds.
There is hardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day
where one cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these
two worlds, flitting past one through the streets in people's
faces, and nightly before our eyes, struggling with each other
to possess, to swallow away into itself human souls, to master
the fate of man upon the earth.
One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is
the Machine-made World.
. . . . . . .
As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people
in them flocking past me, I have come to have certain momen-
tary but recurrent resentments and attractions, unaccountable
strong emotions; and when I try afterward to rationalize my
emotions, as a man should, and give an account of them to
myself, and get them ready to use and face my age with, and
make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself
with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one
cannot live in an age strongly and fitly if one would rather
be living in some other age, or if it is an age with two worlds in
it and one cannot make up one's mind which is the world one
wants and settle down quietly and live in it. Then a strange
thing happens, and always happens the moment I begin to
try to decide which of the two—the Hand-made World or the
Machine-made World—I will choose. I find that in an odd,
confused, groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them
both. In spite of all its ugly ways—a kind of vast indifference
it has to me, to everybody, its magnificent heartlessness—I
find I have come to take in the Machine-made World a kind
of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a terrible and strange
beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I wanted to give
it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the world
combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a [37]
hundred thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly
up again in a little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World.
There must be some way out, some connecting link between
the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We have merely
lost it for a moment.
Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing
through which the whole world whispers to me on my desk,
to the mighty railways that beckon past my door, to the air-
ships that cannot be stilled, and to the rolling mills that will
not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to the Machines Them-
selves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced them.
There is some way in which they can answer and can be made
to answer—can be made to give me and the men about me
the kind of world we want. I try to analyze it and think it
out. What is the thing, the real thing in the Hand-made
World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that I cannot and
will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it something
that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it, some-
thing that might be in some new form saved, made an atmos-
phere or a spirit and passed on? And what is it in the new
Machine-made World which, in spite of the splendid joy, a
rough new, wild religion there is in it, keeps daily filling me
as I go past machines with this contradictory obstinate dread
of them? After a time I have made a little cleared space in
my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me from
thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World
perhaps is not these particular Hand-made things themselves
in which I so delight, but the Hand-made spirit of the men
who made them which the men put into the things. And
perhaps what is full of death and fear in the Machine-made
World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made
spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the
machines work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive,
eternal. Perhaps it can escape like a spirit, and can live where
it will live, and do what it will do, like a spirit, and possess the [38]
body that it wills to possess. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit
is still living around me to-day, and is not only living, but is
living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body than any spirit
has ever lived in before, and is to-day before our eyes, laying
its huge iron fingers around our little earth, and holding the
oceans in its hand, and brushing away mountains with a
breath, until we have Man at last playing all night through
the sky, with visions and airships and telescopes. His very
words walk on the air with soft and unseen feet.
It is the Hand-made spirit that creates machines. The
machines themselves are still the mighty children of the men
who move and work in the Hand-made spirit; and the men who
glory in them, the men who bring them forth, who think them
out, and who create them, and who do the great and mighty
things with them, are still the Hand-made men.
. . . . . . .
This leads us up to the question we are all asking ourselves
every day. "How can a machine-made world be run in the
spirit of a hand-made world?" The particular form in which
the question has been put, which is taken from "Inspired
Millionaires" is as follows:
"The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a
machine which makes it inherently unspiritual is based upon
the experience of the world; but it is, after all, a rather amateur
and juvenile world with machines as yet. Its ideas are in
their first stages, and are based for the most part upon the
world's experience with second-rate men, working in second-
rate factories—men who have been bullied, and could be
bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines
themselves. No one would think of denying that men who
let machines get the better of them, either in their minds or
their bodies, in any walk of life, grow unspiritual and mechani-
cal. But it does not take a machine to make a machine out of
a man. Anything will do it if the man will let it. Even the [39]
farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and
working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he
buries his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried
many thousands of years, and the other kind of farmer is
known by everybody—the farmer who is master over the
soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of the soil himself,
makes the soil express him. The next thing that is going to
happen is that every one is going to know the other kind of
mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic
we largely have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a
machine, a turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be
classed as vegetable life. He is not even organic matter except
in a very small part of himself.
"But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the
man unspiritual. It is the mechanical man beside the machine.
A master at a piano (which is a machine) makes it a spiritual
thing; and a master at a printing-press, like William Morris,
makes it a free and artistic and self-expressive thing."
I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory.
I went past miles of machines—great glass roofs of sun-
shine over them—and looked in the faces of thousands of
men. As I went through the machines I kept looking to and
fro between the machines and the men who stood beside them,
and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines
and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every
machine, I saw (anyone could see it in that factory) was making
a man of somebody. One could see the spirit of the man who
invented the machine, and the spirit of the man who worked
with it, and the spirit of the man who owned it and who placed
it there with the man, all softly, powerfully running together.
There were exceptions, and every now and then one came, of
course, upon the man who seemed to be simply another and
somewhat different contrivance or attachment to his machine
—some part that had been left over and thought of last, and
had not been done as well as the others; but the factory, taken [40]
as a whole, from the manager's offices and the great counting-
room, and from the tall chimneys to the dump, seemed to me
to have something fresh and human and unwonted about it.
It seemed to be a factory that had a look, a look of its own.
It was like a vast countenance. It had features, an expression.
It had an air—well, one must say it, of course, if one is driven
to it: the factory had a soul, and was humming it. Anyone
could have seen why by going into his office and talking a little
while with the owner, or by even not talking to him—by
seeing him look up from his desk. After walking through
several miles of his personality, and up and down and down
and up the corridors of his mind, one did not really need to
meet him except as a matter of form and as a finishing touch.
One had been visiting with him all along: to look in his face
was merely to sum it. up, to see it all, the whole place, over
again in one look. One did not need to be surprised; one
might have known what such a man would be like—that such
a factory could only be conceived and wrought by a man of
genius, a kind of lighted-up man. A man who had put not
only skylights in his buildings, but skylights in his men, would
have to have a skylight in himself (a skylight with a motor
attachment, of course).
If one were to try to think in nature or in art of something
that would be like him—well, some kind of transcendental
engine, I should say, running softly, smoothly outdoors in a
great sunshine, would have given one a good idea of him.
But, however this may be, it certainly would have been quite
impossible to go through his factory and ever say again that
machines do not and could not have souls, or at least over-
souls, and that men who worked with machines did not and
could not have souls as fast as they were allowed to.
A few days later I went through another factory, and I
came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable
and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged
about the people who had to work with them, as John Ruskin [41]
did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first
lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities
into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations,
and began making for us—all around us, before our eyes,
as though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty,
helpless little religions—the hell we had ceased to be-
lieve in.
The hell is here, and is going to be here apparently as long
as may be necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more.
If a hell on our own premises, shut down hard over our lives here
and now, is what is necessary to make us religious and human
once more, if we are reduced to it, and if having a hard, literal
hell—one of our own—is our only way of seeing things,
of fighting our way through to the truth, and of getting once
more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I
for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to
hurry us along and soon have it over with.
But while, like Ruskin, anyone can look about the machines
and see hell, he can see hell to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven
lined up close beside it. The machines have come to have
souls. The machines we can see all about us have taken sides.
We can all of us see the machines about us to-day like vast
looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the world, the
fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little
children, and the very fate of God; and everything about us we
can see turning at last on what we are doing with the machines
that are about us, and what we are letting our machines do
with us.
. . . . . . .
It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side
by side with machines better from day to day, to consider
what these two souls or spirits in the machines are, and what
they are doing and likely to do. If one knows them and one
sees them, and sees how they are working, it is easier to take [42]
sides and join in and help.
It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery
—the spirit of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting
out of work; and there is the spirit in the machines, too, of
moving mountains, conquering the sea and air, of working
harder and lifting one's work over to more heroic, to more
splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things. It is
these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control
of our machine civilization. I watch the machines and the
men beside them and see which side they are on. The labourer
who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the
capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his
money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of
employers and employees), and there may be seen standing
on the other side against them, battling for our world, another
small but mighty group made up of the labourer who loves
his work more than his wages, and the capitalist who loves the
thing he makes more than the profit. In other words, the
fate of our modern civilization, with all its marvellous machines
on it, its art galleries and its churches, is all hanging to-day
on the battle between the spirit of achievement, the spirit
of creating things, and the spirit of weariness or the spirit of
thinking of ways of getting out of things.
It does not take very long to see which one prefers when
one considers the problem of living in one world or the other.
If we are to take our choice between living in a world run by
tired men and a world run by inspired ones, most of us will
have little difficulty in deciding which we would prefer, and
which one we are bound to have. I have been moved to come
forward with the idea of inspired employers—or, as I have
called it, "Inspired Millionaires"—because it would seem to
me inspired employers are the very least we can ask for; for
certainly if even our employers cannot be inspired or rested
and strong, we cannot expect their overworked workmen to be.
There is no hope for us but to write our books and to live our [43]
lives in such a way as to help put the world in the hands of the
Strong, and to help keep its institutions and customs out of
the hands of the overworked. Overworked mechanical em-
ployers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the
problem of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean
resentful, temporary way.
And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and
the men who are working with the machines, or owning them,
it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides. I will
not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and ar-
ranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical
men. Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole genera-
tions of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the
machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come
to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine—
whether it is a machine called a factory, or a, machine called
a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation—is,
Is he tired? I have cast my lot once for all—and as it seems
to me, too, the lot of the world—with those men who are
rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more
not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts,
steady in their imaginations, great men—men who are not
driven to being self-centred or driven to being class-centred,
who can be world-centred and inspired.
When one has made this decision, that one will work for a
world in control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought
face to face with a fact in our machine civilization which
probably is quite new, and which the spirit of man has never
had to face in any age before.
For the first time in the history of the world, machinery
has made it possible for the world to get into the hands of the
weak.
The Gun began it—the gun in a coward's hands may side [44]
with the weak, and the machine in the hands of the weak may
temporarily give the world a list or a trend, and leave it leaning
on the wrong side.
The Trust, for instance, which is really an extremely valuable
invention, and perhaps, on the whole, the most important
machine of modern times when it is used to defend the rights
of the people, is a very different thing when it is pointed at
them. We have to-day, not unnaturally, the spectacle of
perhaps nine people out of ten getting up and saying in chorus
all through the world that Trusts ought to be abolished; and
yet it cannot honestly be said that there is really anything
about the trust-machine—any more than any other machine
—that is inherently wicked, or mechanical and heartless.
Our real objection to the trust-machines is not to the machines
themselves, but to the fact that they are, or happen to be
(judging each Trust by itself), in the hands of the weak and
of the tired—of men, that is, who have no spirit, no imagina-
tion about people; mechanical-minded men, who, at least in
the past, have taken the easiest and laziest course in business—
that of making all the money they can.
The moment we see the Trusts in the hands of the strong
men, the men who are unwilling to slump back into mere
money-making, and who face daily with hardihood and with
joy the feat of weaving into business several strands of value
at once, making things and making money and making men
together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human
happiness, lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day
and night.
If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under
the machines, we can only bring it to pass by doing everything
we can in directors' meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or
as journalists—whatever we may be—to keep the trust-
machines in this world out of the hands of the tired, weak, and
mechanical-minded men.
And the things that have been. happening to the trust- [45]
machines, or are about to happen to them, have happened
and are beginning to happen before our eyes to the machines
themselves. The machines of flame and iron wheels and men
in monstrous factories which the philosophers and the poets
and the very preachers have doomed our world with are passing
through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall
be seen at last through the dim struggle yielding themselves,
bending their iron wills to the same indomitable human spirit,
the same slow, stern, implacable will of the soul of man. They
shall be inspired machines.
Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the
weak and mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes
the line of least resistance in business, on every hand about us,
making his employees mechanical-minded. The men have
not been able to work without machines to work with, and as
they have been obliged to come to him to get the machines, he
has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the weakest
and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He
takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns
them back against them, points them at their lives, stops
their minds with them, their intelligence and manhood, the
very hope and religion with which they live; and of course,
when men have had machines pointed at them long enough,
one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into
machines themselves—as deadly and as hopeless to make a
civilization out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to
have for fathers as machines would be, as iron or leather or
wood.
In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing
—partly by competition. and partly by combination and by
experience—employers who are not mechanical-minded, who
have spirit themselves, and who believe in it and can use it in
others; who find ways of adjusting the hours, the wages, and
the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most valuable
in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly good-will, [46]
can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as the
most important part of the working equipment of the factory.
These employers have found (by believing it long enough to
try it) that live men can do better and more marketable work
than dead ones. If the great slow-moving majority of our
modern machine employers were not mechanical-minded, it
would not be necessary to prove to them categorically the little
platitude (which even people who have observed cab-horses
know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead, and
that live men can do better and more marketable work than
half-dead ones.
But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or
by arguments or by figures, they may have to be convinced
by losing their business; for the most spirited employers, those
who take the more difficult and creative course of making
money and men together, are sure to be the employers who will
get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to crowd out
of the market in their own special line employers who can
only get and keep mechanical-minded ones.
. . . . . . .
It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle
now going on among the trades unions between the spirited
labourers and the tired ones, and among the manufacturers
between the inspired employers and the mechanical-minded
ones.
For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers
who have most power to change the conditions of labour and
to free the mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are
standing to-day on the great strategical ground of our time.
They hold the pass of human life. People cannot expect to be
inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy and too incon-
venient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate their
energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on
insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are [47]
pouring in with their wages their thoughts, and their motives,
the very hope with which they live, into their lives, shall be
the champions of the people, shall represent them and act for
them, as they are not placed to act for themselves, and with
more imagination than they can yet expect to have for them-
selves. If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle
out from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all
that they can in labour unions and in the press and at the
polls to keep the machines in this world out of the hands of
tired and mechanical-minded owners.
But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or
mechanicalness in machines is not going to come from the
employers on the one hand or the employees on the other,
but from having the employees in the Trades Unions and the
employers in the directors' meetings combining together to
keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all
men, whether directors or employees, who do not work harder
than they have to, and who have not the brains to do their
work for something besides money. The men who are like
this will of course be pitied and duly considered, but they will
be kept where they will not have power to control other men,
or where by force of position or by mere majority they will be
able to bully other men to work as mechanically as they do.
Workmen who do not want to become machines can only
better conditions by combination with so-called inspired em-
ployers—employers who work harder than they have to,
who dote on the great human difficulties of work, who choose
not the easiest but the most perfect way of doing things, who
are never mechanical themselves, and will not let their men be
if they can help it. I have liked to call these employers in-
spired millionaires. I would rather have the machine owner
or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an
inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away
from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour
and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines [48]
are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men-
men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will
be seen on every hand around us as the engines of war against
evil, against slavery, the whirling weapons of the Spirit.
Even now, in dreams have I stood and watched them—
the will of the people like a flail in their mighty hands—this
vast army of machines—go thundering past, driving the
uninspired and mechanical off the face of the earth.
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