Its banks are wide and its current is swift, but the turbid stream that flows onward is one of muddy swirls and eddies and overflows its banks to their destruction.

The great indictment, however, of the present age of mechanical power is that it has largely destroyed the spirit of work.

Has the increase in the potential of human power, through thermodynamics, been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the potential of human character?

Indeed, it would be impossible; for, in speaking of its evils, I freely recognize that not only would civilization perish without its beneficent aid, but that every step forward in the history of man has been coincident with, and in large…

But suppose the development of labour-saving machinery should reach a stage where all human labour was eliminated, what would be the effect on man?

Take from man the opportunity of work and the sense of pride in achievement and you have taken from him the very life of his existence.

To-day millions who simply watch an automatic infallible machine, which requires neither strength nor skill, do not sing at their work but too many curse the fate, which has chained them, like Ixion, to a soulless machine.

The specialization of our modern mechanical civilization has caused a submergence of the individual into the group or class.

Man is fast ceasing to be the unit of human society.

The true justification for the American anti-monopoly statutes, including the Sherman anti-trust law, lies not so much in the realm of economics as in that of morals.

With the submergence of the individual, whether he be capitalist or wage-earner, into a group, there has followed the dissipation of moral responsibility.

A mass morality has been substituted for individual morality, and unfortunately, group morality generally intensifies the vices more than the virtues of man.

Possibly, the greatest result of the mechanical age is this spirit of organization.

We are now beginning to see--slowly, but surely--that a faculty of organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is not an unmixed good.

Indeed, the moral lesson of the tragedy of Germany is the demoralizing influence of organization carried to the nth power.

Its dominating mechanical spirit so submerged the individual that, in 1914, the paradox was observed of an enlightened nation that was seemingly destitute of a conscience.

What was true of Germany, however, was true--although in lesser degree--of all civilized nations.

In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his nobler self.

As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.

Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind.

It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact--mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress--but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would…

A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass.

Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?