James Beck

The machine now not only acts for him, but too often thinks for him.

In thus acquiring from the forces of Nature almost illimitable power, he has minimized the necessity for his own physical exertion or even mental skill.

Like the giants of the ancient fable, he has stormed the very ramparts of Divine power, or, like Prometheus, he has stolen fire of omnipotent forces from Heaven itself for his use.

We must seek some widespread change in social conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the change must, therefore, be of environment.

To diagnose truly this malady we must look to some cause that is coterminous in time with the disease itself and which has been operative throughout civilization.

And yet if we were to attribute the malady merely to excessive individualism, we would again err in mistaking a symptom for a cause.

Men talked, and still talk, loudly of their rights, but too rarely of their duties.

Undoubtedly, the excessive emphasis upon the rights of man, which marked the political upheaval of the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has contributed to this malady of the age.

Proceeding to deeper and less recognized causes, some would attribute this spirit of lawlessness to the rampant individualism, which began in the eighteenth century, and which has steadily and naturally grown with the advance of democratic…

The law's delays and laxity in administration breed a spirit of contempt, and too often invite men to take the law into their own hands.

A race of individualists obey reluctantly, when they obey at all, any laws which they regard as unreasonable or vexatious.

In this age of democracy, the average individual is too apt to recognize two constitutions--one, the constitution of the State, and the second, an unwritten constitution, to him of higher authority, under which he believes that no law is…

Unquestionably, the political state suffers in authority by the abuse of legislation, and especially by the appeal to law to curb evils that are best left to individual conscience.

Thus Napoleon, on the eve of the 18th Brumaire, complained that France, with a thousand folios of law, was a lawless nation.

Thus, the multiplicity of laws does not tend to develop a law-abiding spirit.

Indeed, it is possible that the world war, far from causing the malaise of the age, was, in itself, but one of its many symptoms.

If there is to be a remedy, we must first diagnose this malady of the human soul.

If my reader agrees with me in my premises then we are not likely to disagree in the conclusion that the causes of these grave symptoms are not ephemeral or superficial; but must have their origin in some deep-seated and world-wide change…

It is enough to say that, while the Church as an institution continues to exist, the belief in the supernatural and even in the spiritual has been supplanted in the souls of millions of men by a gross and debasing materialism.

Man has danced upon the verge of a social abyss, and, as previously suggested, the dancing has, both in form and in accompanying music, lost its former grace and reverted to the primitive forms of crude vulgarity.

Accompanying this indisposition to work efficiently has been a mad desire for pleasure, such as, if it existed in like measure in preceding ages, has not been seen within the memory of living man.

Everywhere the phenomenon has been observed that, with the highest wages known in the history of modern times, there has been an unmistakable lessening of efficiency, and that with an increase in the number of workers, there has been a…

On the contrary, the whole history of the mechanical era is a persistent struggle for more pay and less work, and to-day it has culminated in world-wide ruin; for there is not a nation in civilization which is not now in the throes of…

The great evil of the world to-day is this aversion to work.

The conception of work as a degrading servitude, to be done with reluctance and grudging inefficiency, seems to be the ideal of millions of men of all classes and in all countries.