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OUROBOROSOR

The MechanicalExtension of Mankind

BY

GARET GARRETT

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY681 FIFTH AVENUE

COPYRIGHT, 1926By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

Alt Rights Reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Ouroboros was a fabulous snake, theencircling serpent, that swallowed its owntail. It represented an infantile thoughtof the human mind for wish fulfilment bymagical means. Man's heroic businesswas to conquer the reptile. As he did thishe seized the object he most desired. Hemight even wish himself into solid gold.

CONTENTSPAGE

I. THE QUEST SINCE ADAM i

II. THE MACHINE AS IF 19

III. THE LAW OF MACHINES 29

IV. WHO MIND THEM OR

STARVE 42

V. THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS 61

VI. IN PERIL OF TRADE 77

VII. DIM VISTAS NEW 91

Til

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THE QUEST SINCE ADAM

O N E story of us is continuous. It isthe story of our struggle to recapture theGarden of Eden, meaning by that a stateof existence free from the doom of toil.

So long as the character of our economiclife was agricultural, as it almost whollywas until a very recent time, the attack wasnaive. In the file of prayers, if one iskept, the thickest, dustiest bundle is that ofour supplications for plenty—miraculousplenty without worry or price. We wereloath to believe that the second arrange-ment between God and Adam made at thegate of exit—

Cursed is the ground for thy sake;In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread

to

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—was forever; and for a long timeafterward local weather conditions werewistfully misunderstood, as a chastisementwhen they were bad and a sign of relent-ing when they were good. It was forever.Nature's ring was closed, never again toopen for any darling fructuary.

That is to say, man's taking from thesoil is an arbitrary wage. He may increasethe gross of it a little by exerting himselfmore; the scale he cannot alter. If tilthfor the individual has been made easiersomewhat and more productive by the useof wheeled implements, power tools andnow airplanes to dust the orchard with in-secticide, these, you must remember, repre-sent a tremendous increase of effort bymankind at large upon the principle oflimited fecundity that governs the earth.

When at length the realistic mind per-ceived that here was a natural fact uponwhich prayers, thanksgiving, sacrifice, idol-atry, and the pretentions of magic were allalike wasted, the spiritual part of us nodoubt had been willing to accept the sen-

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tence. Not so the earthy and lusty part.The curse was heavy. There was never arisk man would not take, no kind of heroicexertion he would spare himself, to escapethe evil, the boredom, the drudgery ofrepetitious toil.

From such puerile motivation came theAge of Discovery, then physical science,purposeful mechanical invention, the in-dustrial era, and all the artificial marvelsof the modern world. These effects arehistorically traceable; and if it shouldoccur to you to wonder why they are somuch more vivid and astonishing in theWest than in the East, that is easily ex-plained. The European mind went onwith the phantasy of an earthly paradiseof plenty and leisure after the Orientalmind in weariness of wisdom had given itup.

Until four hundred years ago the Euro-peans believed that somewhere in the worldwas a fabulous land whose inhabitants livedas in dreams, eating and drinking fromgolden vessels, wearing priceless jewels like

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common beads, sated with ease and luxury.King, courts, astronomers, and navigatorsbelieved this. The vulgar fancy was fora place such as Cockaigne of the medievalballads where all features of the landscapewere good to eat or drink and nobody everwas obliged to work. In quest of thismythical region the pioneer feats of cir-cumnavigation were performed.

What a disparity between the characterof the motive and the shape of the dead!or is it that men do not know theirmotives?

The earth was explored. It was foundto be round and full of labor. This, ofcourse, was a terrible disappointment.

The ceaseless mind then turned toalchemy with the idea that base metalswhere changeable into gold; from thiscame chemistry and the study of matterand physical phenomena in a new way,taking nothing for granted. This was thebeginning of true science. As to whatmight come of it practically there was atfirst only the rudest kind of notion. Dimly

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T H E QUEST SINCE ADAM

it was understood that exact knowledgemust somehow increase man's power, givehim control of the elementary circum-stance, enable him perhaps to commandthat which hitherto he had got by hazard.When a great body of fact knowledge hadbeen accumulated, men began to see littleby little how it might be dynamically ap-plied. Then the epoch of mechanicalinvention.

The idea of machines was not new.Long before the beginning of the Chris-tian era the ancients had produced manywonderful automatic devices; but mechan-ical knowledge with them was a depart-ment of magic. The use of machines wasto mystify the multitude. Brazen figureswere made to move, dragons to hiss, templedoors to open and close, trees to emitmusical sounds, and lamps to trim them-selves perpetually by means of floats, cogwheels, cylinders, valves, and pistons, allacting on sound principles of pneumaticsand hydraulics. Much of this ancient tech-nology was lost or forgotten. The Euro-

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pean mind rediscovered it gradually in aspirit of scientific curiosity, with no cleareconomic intention. And but for a simplepractical idea, one that was very slow tocome through, the machine no doubt wouldstill be what it anciently was—an objectof superstition, the toy of wonder, an ac-cessory of priestcraft.

And what an obvious idea it was! Mere-ly to exploit the machine's slave value.Merely to see an engine as a beast of bur-den and the loom as a projection of thehand, both instruments of magnified pro-duction, to spare the labor of mankind.

That moment in which the use of me-chanical energy came to be so conceivedwas one of elemental significance. Allthe chances of human life were altered,though not as anyone supposed nor as theywere meant to be.

The course of internal evolution re-quires to be imagined. It is slow beyondperception. It may not be a fact; or, foraught we know, it may be finished in thespecies. Suddenly, man begins to augment

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himself by an external process. His nat-ural powers become extensible to a degreethat makes them original in kind. To hisgiven structure—the weakest among ani-mal structures in proportion to its bulk—headds an automatic, artificial member, re-sponsive only to his contact, answerableonly to his will, uncontrolled by nature,fabulous in its possibilities of strength,variation, and cunning.

His use of it in three generations haschanged the design of civilization out ofrecognition. That change alone which setsour time off abruptly from all time beforeis the fact of potential plenty. We takethis for granted as if it were a natural fact,whereas instead all the circumstances havebeen invented. ,

We who are born to the view cannotsee it. We cannot imagine what it waslike to live in a world where famine wasa frequent visitation and all things werescarce. Yet never until now has the humanrace known what plenty was. Immem-orially the word has signified food.

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See, the smell of my son is as the smell of afield the Lord has blessed. God give thee ofthe dew of the heaven and the fatness of theearth and plenty of wine and corn.

The cornucopia, horn of plenty, nevercontained a fabricated thing; only thefruits of the earth.

That old meaning of the word has beenrecently lost. Modernly we speak ofgoods; we talk of the standard of living,which is understood of course to includeproper quantities of food, and to mean, be-sides food, an endless number of artificialthings which people increasingly requirefor their comfort and well being.

Mechanical energy does not producefood. Nor has the principle of limitedfecundity that governs the earth been sus-pended. Yet the machine has enormouslyincreased the food supply in two ways:first, agriculture is equipped with powertools, so that one man now may performthe labor of many; second, transportationhas made all the food-producing areas ofthe world accessible, so that grain from

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the middle of the North American conti-nent and grain from Argentina aremingled unawares in the European loaf.

This use of the machine to distributefood swiftly over the whole world fromwhere there is a surplus to where that sur-plus is needed has had profound political,economic, and social consequences, begin-ning with an increase of the human speciesvastly beyond any number that had at anytime previously existed or could ever beforehave been sustained upon the earth. Thatis the one most awesome phenomenon ofthe industrial era. The North Americancontinent has been peopled from Europeanstock. Its present population is equal tothat of all Europe in 1800. This drainof emigration notwithstanding, the popu-lation of Europe in the same time hastrebled.

And still there is plenty.Where it is not actual it is potential.

Who have not plenty are either too inertor too ignorant to put forth the moderneffort. What people may use, enjoy, and

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consume now is an X quantity, determinedneither by the rhythms of nature nor anybiological principle but simply by the freetotal of their own exertions.

Faster than the race has multiplied thepowers of the machine have increased.One of these is the power of transpor-tation whereby the food product of thewhole earth is made uniformly available.The other power is represented by a divis-ible product of artificial things tending toexceed the sum of effective human desire.

To wishful desire there is no limit what-ever; but there is a point at which theeffort necessary to obtain the object—thatis, the toil—will be weighed against the de-sire to possess it, and only when and if theobject is deemed worth the effort is desireeffective in the economic sense.

From the paradox mentioned — thattendency of the machine's divisible productto overwhelm the sum of effective desire—we get a series of complex phenomenaof which there is nowhere yet a completeunderstanding.

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This now is a buyer's world where for-merly it was the seller's. Business nolonger sits in Asiatic dignity waiting forits customers; it must up and seek them.The buyer is pursued.

As I write, the strains of a Liszt rhap-sody float into my window. They comefrom a farmer's cottage a little way downthe road. Yesterday a motor truck stoppedat his house and unloaded a self-playingpiano. I saw it and noticed that it gotslightly damaged squeezing through thetiny doorway.

What does this mean? First, it meansthat day before yesterday a salesman fromthe city went through this road sellingself-playing pianos for a nominal cash sumdown and the balance on monthly instal-ments. He sold one there, another in thenext house but one, and a third further on.How many he sold to the end of the roadI do not know.

But what does it mean that the city sendsa man through a country road in southernNew Jersey to sell pianos in this beguiling

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manner to people who cannot afford them?Those who bought them I know were allin debt for other things bought on the in-stalment plan. It means there is a neces-sity to sell this industrial product. It isthe necessity of a factory that has over-taken the normal demand for self-playingpianos and must force the sale of its sur-plus. It is the necessity of all who workin that factory and live thereby. It is thenecessity of industry in general, governedas it is by a principle it did not invent.

The principle is that the divisible prod-uct of the machine is cheap in proportionto the quantity. Remember that principle.We shall meet it again.

As with player-pianos and radio sets inmy country road, so with all manner ofartificial things, with the whole divisibleproduct of the machine, in every road,every street, every market of the world.How to produce enough is no longer anyproblem at all. How to sell what is in-creasingly produced—that is the problem.

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Evidence thereof is the commonest thingwe see. It is painted in the landscape. Itilluminates the cities at night. It is in ourmarginal vision when we read. There isno lifting one's eyes to heaven, no castingthem down in shame, no seeing whateverwithout seeing it.

Each day a forest is cut down and con-sumed for wood pulp to make the paperon which producers advertise their wares.The use of advertising is to stimulate inpeople a sense of wanting. Selling is ahigh profession to which men are trainedin special schools. To exchange goods formoney over a counter, to higgle with theindividual buyer — that is not selling.Clerks and peddlers do that. Selling is tocreate new ways of wanting, new habitsof comfort and luxury, new customs ofhaving. This is done by agitating the massimagination with the suggestive power ofadvertising. Business reserves its mostdazzling rewards for one who can thinkof a way to make thousands, millions,

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whole races of people, want that thing to-day which they knew not the lack ofyesterday.

Why is this so? Because there is neverenough wanting.

And why is there never enough want-ing? Because the divisible product of themachine tends to increase faster thanwanting.

What advertising cannot accomplishgovernments may undertake. There arebackward, inert, idle races that do not wantmuch. They are content to do with little.It becomes therefore the diplomatic andmilitary business of the powerful industrialgovernments to change the ways of suchraces. They must be brought forward,modernized, electrified, taught how towant more. Why? In order that theyshall be able to consume their quota of themachine's divisible product. Plenty shallbe put upon them.

There is no limit to that blessing. Thosewho have it are anxious to share it, mustshare it in fact, in order to keep it for


themselves, under the principle that thecheapness of things is in proportion to thequantity produced. The more the cheaper;the fewer the dearer.

Are you beginning to suppose that manhas found what he sought? Since in thisextraordinary manner he appears to haveprovided himself with plenty, shall thatdusty bundle of prayers be recalled or sentto the furnace?

As to his prayers, they were never frank.Perhaps for that reason he should wish hehad them back. He prayed for plenty;what he secretly associated with the thoughtof plenty was leisure — freedom fromtoil. And once more he is disappointed,thwarted by his own inventions. Plentyhe has achieved. Toil he has not escaped.

The machine that was to have been alabor-saving device becomes an engine ofproduction that must be served. It is as ifyou could not save labor at all—as if youcould make it only more productive, there-by achieving an abundance of things withno effect whatever upon the necessity to

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perform monotonous labor. All this labor-saving machinery we live with notwith-standing, never were people more com-plaining of their tasks. That might meanonly that they were increasingly consciousof an abating evil; but there is no cer-tainty that the abatement even where it isnoticeable is permanent. The signs areotherwise.

In all material respects people are betteroff than ever before. Their bodies aremore comfortable, their minds are freefrom the terror of hunger, they have muchmore to enjoy and consume and hope for,because their labor is more richly rewardedin things. See the amazing quantity andvariety of things such as only the richcould once afford now circulating at thebase of the human pyramid. Not neces-saries only. Silks, watches, ornaments,shoes like those of queens and ladies, platedware, upholstered furniture, soft beds, be-sides things that were f ormely non-existentand therefore beyond the reach of kings,sultans and nabobs, such as electric lights,

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plumbing, motor cars. In the UnitedStates a motor car to every six persons!And still no sign that the curve of humancontentment is rising; no sign that thecurse of toil will ever be got rid of.

Instead of saving labor the machine hasmultiplied it. True, the hours of indus-trial labor are fewer than they were, e. g,now eight where they were ten and twelvea day; but this is merely to compare worsewith better where better is, and that is noteverywhere. For a proper contrast com-pare the industrial with the idyllic task.Even eight hours of labor a day continu-ously performed by the industrial workerrepresents a much greater sum of annualeffort than his ancestor put to the soil.Consider also how the machine, directlyor indirectly, has laid new work uponraces hitherto naively existing in a stateof nature.

The riddle is that industrial civiliza-tion, having created to its unknown endsa race of mechanical drudges, requiresnevertheless a contribution of human toil

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more intense, more exacting, more irksomethan ever. As toil it is more productive;there is more to consume. Life has beenexpanded. It is safer. Physically it isinconceivably richer. Was that the goal?What else is gained?

You would think that when man hadfound a way to provide himself with arti-ficial things in unlimited plenty and a wayat the same time to spread the food supplyevenly over the face of the earth, the giftof universal peace might follow. Neverwas the peace more frail; and this, as weshall see—the frailty of the peace—also isa product of the machine.

What force is this by fumbling foundthat man has put in motion? Its pulsa-tions he controls; its consequences so farhave controlled him, and modern life hasbecome so involved in a mechanical spiralthat we cannot say for sure whether it isthat we produce for the sake of consump-tion or consume for the sake of produc-tion.

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II

THE MACHINE AS IF

EITHER the machine has a meaning tolife that we have not yet been able to in-terpret in a rational manner or it is itselfa manifestation of life and therefore mys-terious. We have seen it grow. We knowit to be the exterior reality of our ownideas. Thus we are very familiar with it>as with our arms and legs, and see it inmuch the same way—that is to say, im-perfectly and in some aspects not at ail-Certainly it would look very different iffor a moment we could see it from anoriginal point of view with the eye of newwonder.

Fancy yourself a planetary tourist comevisiting here, knowing beforehand neitherGod nor man, unable therefore to dis-tinguish intuitively between their works.

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Would you not think the machine thatspins silk threads by the ton from cellu-lose more wonderful than the silkwormsimilarly converting the mulberry leaf inprecious quantities? or a steel ship moreamazing than a whale ? What of the me-chanical beast with a colorless fluid in itstail and a flame in its nose that runs sixtymiles an hour without weariness? Wouldit not seem superior in many ways to thehorse that goes forty miles in a day andfalls down?

Suppose, moreover, that you know thetongue of men and are able to ask themquestions. You ask particularly about theautomobile, which you have mentally com-pared with the horse; whereupon they takeyou to the factories in Detroit to see theautomobile in process of becoming, underconditions of mass production, two or threetaking life with a snort every minute. Inthis factory, they tell you, they make onlyone hundred a day, very fine ones; but inanother they make five hundred, and inanother five thousand a day.

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T H E MACHINE AS IF

You ask them who makes the horse.They do not know. They teach their

children to say God makes it. The horseis a natural thing.

Then the automobile is an unnaturalthing?

They say no, smiling a little. Not anunnatural thing. The automobile is a me-chanical thing because they make it them-selves.

You ask them why they say they make it.At this they are distressed. There has

been some slip of understanding in the useof language. They explain it carefully.The horse is born. There is no horse fac-tory. The automobile is made, as you haveseen, in factories.

Still it is not explained. You argue itwith them. What is it they do in the fac-tory? They perform certain acts in rela-tion to automobiles. These, of course, arenecessary, vital acts. If they were not per-formed automobiles could not be. Andyet, how does this prove they make auto-mobiles? You ask them.

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They ask you to say what else it couldprove.

You may say it proves only that theyare fathers of automobiles; and since theyseem mystified greatly by this answer youremind them that in relation to their ownchildren also they perform ç¾tajn_vjtal¿cts, essential to beget them and withoutwhich children could not be, yet they arenever heard to say they make children.They say children are born.

This has to be left as it is. Further ex-planations lead to worse confusion.

You ask them certain other questions.How long have they been on the earth—themselves? How long have they had ma-chines? What did they do before they hadmachines?

By their replies certain facts are estab-lished in your mind, and from these factsyou make certain deductions, all clearenough to you but incomprehensible tothem.

The facts are as follows: People havebeen here on the earth a very long time,

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THE MACHINE AS IF

millions of years, they think. Machinesthey have had for only a very short time,or, as you now see them, for only two gen-erations. Before they had machines nearlyeveryone tilled the soil. There was no in-dustry save handicraft. In the space ofone hundred years these conditions have soremarkably changed that now only halfthe people are required to till the soil; theother half live by industry. This does notmean what you thought at first; it does notmean that half the fields have been aban-doned so that half the people might gointo industry. You are careful to get thisstraight, for it is very important. On thecontrary, since machines appeared wholenew continents of land have been openedto cultivation. This was necessary in orderto feed the industrial workers who live incities, far off from fields, and buy theirfood, whereas formerly everyone generallyspeaking produced his own food, even thepeople of what once were called citiesgoing forth seasonally to till and reap theearth. Actually, the number of people

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engaged in agriculture has greatly in-creased; yet it is only half the populationwhere before it was the whole of it. Whatdoes this mean? It means that since theadvent of machines the human race hasenormously increased in number; it has soincreased that the half of it which now isagricultural is greater than the whole of itwas before. The new, non-agriculturalhalf is the industrial part; it is the part thatserves machines.

This fact is so astonishing that you wishto verify it. You ask them what wouldhappen if all the machines in the worldshould vanish suddenly away. Their ans-wer is that half the people living wouldperish in a week. And that is what youthought.

What may you deduce from these facts?First, you will be amused that people are

so naive as to think they make machines.Then you may say there are two kinds ofpeople here, agricultural and industrial.The earth makes one kind; machines make

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THE MACHINE AS IF

the other. And you will feel as sure ofthis as if you had proved it to your senseswhen you have looked at a typical indus-trial city where people live densely in com-pacted habitations with no visible errandon earth but to run to and fro tending themachines that hum night and day in thefactories. Those tall, cylindrical, erupt-ing forms called smokestacks will appearto you as generative symbols. If they werenot there, neither .would the people bethere. Not only would the people not bethere. They would be nowhere. Theycould never have existed. If the smoke-stacks disappeared, so would all thesepeople, the industrial part of the popula-tion, leaving only the agricultural part—the part belonging to the soil—as it wasbefore.

As a planetary tourist, you may be atleast as certain these thoughts are true asmen are that they are untrue; and even ifthey were true that would make no differ-ence really. The problems are practical.

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We must think of machines as machinesact, logically.

One difficulty is that whereas the ma-chine is automatically, unerringly logical,and nothing else, man has only a littlelogic; he has, besides, emotions, sentiments,instincts. In his unlogical character he hasoften opposed himself to the machine,meaning to destroy it. At the opening ofthe Liverpool & Manchester Railway, thefirst railroad in Great Britain and the firstin the world, the anti-machine feeling ofBritish craftsmen was dramatically sym-bolized by a lone weaver seated at a loomon a high hill. England was the indus-trial machine's first habitat on earth.There fanatical men led mobs against it.

Frail and clumsy as it was at first, itslife was indestructible. And now manwould not dare to destroy it if he could.His own life is bound up with it. Steadilyit has grown more powerful, more pro-ductive, more ominous. It has powers ofreproduction and variation which, if not

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THE MACHINE AS IF

inherent, are yet as if governed by an ac-tive biological principle. Machines pro-duce machines. Besides those from whichwe get the divisible product of artificialthings, there are machines to make ma-chines, and both kinds—both the machinesthat make machines and those that trans-form raw materials into things of use anddesire—obey some law of evolution.

Compare any kind of machine you mayhappen to think of with what its ancestorwas only twenty-five years ago. Its effi-ciency has doubled, trebled; its shape haschanged; and as it is in the animal king-dom so too with machines, that suddenlya new species appears, a sport, a freak, withno visible ancestor.

Man's sense of material power withinhis environment has increased proportion-ately. It is colossal. Benefits such asformerly he would have thought beyondsupernatural agency if he could have im-agined them at all he now confers uponhimself. More without end presents only

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technical difficulties. No physical circum-stance forbids him. Nevertheless the fact,and only the more strange it is, that forreasons which he names economic or politi-cal he seem powerless to inform the aug-menting body of machine phenomena witha rational or benign spirit.

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IllTHE LAW OF MACHINES

No longer do we speak of machines.They are too numerous and too different.We speak of industrial equipment, whichmeans machine power in general.

As you may know, the industrial equip-ment of the world is increasing by terifficmomentum. The machine is spreadingover the face of the earth like an idea ofnew truth. And this is so notwithstandingthe fact that the industrial equipmentalready existing in the world is so greatthat if for one year it were worked at idealcapacity the product could not be sold forenough to pay the wages of labor, to thinknothing of the cost of material, overheadcharges or profit. Markets would beglutted with goods. Producers would beruined.

It follows that the pressing anxiety of

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industry is how to regulate and limit pro-duction in order not to overwhelm itsmarkets. Its chronic nightmare is over-production, meaning a quantity of divisibleproducts in excess of the immediate sumof effective desire. Hence combines,pools, rings, cartels, committees, and asso-ciations of manufacturers, which thecourts are powerless to prevent even wherethey are forbidden by law. These are vitalmeasure of mutual preservation. Yet theyare but protcols of truce. They very soonbreak down and have to be made all overagain.

Control of production, save here andthere for a little while, is a myth. Itcould be managed only in case there was amonopoly of machine power. Once therewas. There is no longer and never willbe again. Industrial production, takingit broadly, increases in an uncontrollablemanner.

The evidence is notorious, first in theefforts of national industry to increase thesale of goods in its own country, and then

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T H E LAW O F MACHINES

in the strife among industrial nations foraccess to foreign markets.

A steam calliope jamming its way-through the crowded street of New Yorkcity to advertise a new model of a popularmotor car at a reduced price is a spectacleto bear reflection. It is a symptom ofsaturation in the home market. WhenHenry Ford was making only a thousandcars a day, he did not advertise. Therewas a ready cash demand for the wholeof his product. When his output passedfive-thousand cars a day, he began to ad-vertise on billboards and to sell on the in-stallment plan.

As the natural cash demand for a thingis overtaken, it begins to be pressed forsale on credit. At this point finance stepsin. Credit companies with millions ofcapital are formed expressly for the pur-pose of lending buyers the money withwhich to buy. Desire shall be made effec-tive. Selling on credit in this manner haslatterly and suddenly assumed such pro-portions as to represent in the affair of

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business a new pattern. Some old-fash-ioned minds have been debating it as anevil. They attack it on the ground that itbetrays the virtue of thrift. But thrifthas ceased to be a virtue. T o consume—to consume more and more progressively—to be able to say in the evening, ”I haveconsumed more today than I consumedyesterday,” this now is a duty the in-dividual owes to industrial society.

For see what would happen if people allover the world should return of a suddento the former ways of thrift? to the habitof doing without? There would be de-pression in industry. Machines would stop.Millions who tend them would be disem-ployed. Nothing would be safe, not evenyour own money, for there would be panicon the exchange and trouble at the bank.

One is not speaking of the UnitedStates alone. The multiplication of thingsis greater here than anywhere else becausewe make machines faster and work themharder; but you will find the same neces-sity acting also in France, the very cradle

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T H E LAW OF MACHINES

of thrift, where now cheap motors aresold on credit any anyone who will buymay borrow the money to buy with. Whyis this in France ? To stimulate the motorhabit? To serve a private profit motive?The habit will follow; the profit may.But there is another reason, touching for-eign trade, which we are coming to eluci-date.

In order to sell abroad an industrialnation must be able to produce cheaply.To produce cheaply it must produce inlarge quantities by a multiple methodcalled mass-production. And you cansafely manage this mass-production onlyprovided you have a fairly large and con-stant base of domestic demand. So thesale of French motor cars in France,though it be on credit, must be largeenough to support the method of mass-pro-duction, for otherwise France will be un-able to meet the competition of Ford, whonow exports motor cars to Europe, evenbuilds them there. Then the Britishmanufacturers, to meet the competition of

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both France and Ford, also undertakeagainst their genius to produce motors carsby the quantity method, and havingachieved the method their next dilemma iswhat to do with the product. They ad-vertise at home to create a popular motorcar habit and at the same time press theircars for sale in foreign markets, even inFrance and Germany, as these countriespress theirs for sale in Great Britain.

Competition among industiral nations toexploit one another's internal markets isbut one profile of all that dangerous ac-tivity taking place in the name of foreigntrade. The industrial powers holding theirfeet in China's doorway and France fight-ing the native in Morocco are other aspectsof the same thing. China so long as pos-sible shall be an open market for the sur-plus product of western machines; thereshall be more wanting in Morocco.

The industrial equipment of the worldmeanwhile goes on increasing, though it isalready so great that its capacity cannot befully utilized. In the United States alone

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there is probably enough surplus machinecapacity to satisfy the whole demand ofGreat Britain's foreign customers forstaple merchandise, such as textiles, ironand steel manufactures, rubber tires, motorcars, electrical apparatus, machinery, glass,garments, shoes, cutlery, and so on. GreatBritain not only has a surplus of machinepower; she has besides an excess of manpower represented by one and one-halfmillions chronically unemployed. Shecould easily take on the entire foreigntrade of France; but in France also thereis a surplus of machine power. BothGreat Britain and France dread the com-petition of Germany whose production ofgoods with her existing equipment couldbe increased, under incentive, nobodyknows how much.

The exterior facts do not make sense.They represent industry to be witless, inthat while dreading surplus as the evilthat devoureth profit it is at the same timebent to push supply to a point plus satura-tion. Industry does not do this. Neces-

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sity does it. There is an interior fact.The tendency of the divisible product ofmachines to exceed the sum of effectivedesire is nothing industry wishes uponitself. It is owing to a principle hithertomentioned, namely, the principle that thecheapness of things is in proportion to thequantity produced. Which now is to beexplained.

It is the economic function of the ma-chine to cheapen production. There isotherwise no point to it. But if we saythings are more cheaply made by machinethan by hand we speak very loosely. Whatwe mean is that a quantity of tilings ismore cheaply made by machine than byhand.

For example, the cost of one yard ofcloth produced by machine is many hun-dreds of times greater than the cost of oneyard of similar cloth produced by hand.Obviously, the power loom is a very cost-ly piece of machinery to build, and so isthe engine that drives it. If you producedon a power loom only the amount of cloth

[ 3 6 ]


a weaver could make by hand nobodycould afford to buy it. But when you pro-duce on the power loom a quantity ofcloth one hundred times greater than aweaver can make by hand, then, of course,it is much cheaper. And the more youproduce the cheaper it is. So with any-thing. The greater the quantity the lowerthe cost. Hence the terms quantity, ormass-production, meaning, first, to stand-ardize the product, as to make it all black,all one texture, all one width or shape,and then to bring a chain of machinepower continuously to bear upon its mul-tiple production.

Observe the working of this principle.Take watches. Hitherto they have beenmade by hand, slowly, laboriously, in-stances being not uncommon of a crafts-man spending half his lifetime to make avery fine one. Under these conditionswatches are rare and costly. Only thevery rich can buy them. Suddenly theybegan to be made by machines. A verygood watch can be made for fifty dollars.

[ 3 7 ]

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There are a million people who wantwatches at that price. This is an originaldej&ättd> a kind of vacuum, represented bya million people who have never hadwatches and now, for the first time, maypossess them. Watches cannot be madefast enough to meet this want. The in-dustry, for that reason, expands very fast.Then all at once the demand is satisfied.The million have watches. The vacuumhas been filled. Hereafter the demand willtend to be static; it will increase slowlyas the population increases or as people ingeneral grow richer, little by little. Thewatch-making industry, therefore, is de-pressed. It has to limit production. Nowcomes someone with the idea that by carry-ing the machine method further a watchcan be made for ten dollars. There aretwenty million people who can affordto buy watches at that price. The ten-dollar watch appears. The demand againis like a vacuum, twenty times greater thanthe first. For a while ten-dollar watches

[38]


cannot be made fast enough. The makersof fifty-dollar watches throw away theirold machines, instal new ones, increasetheir production, reduce their costs, andnot only make what was a fifty-dollarwatch for twenty-five but contribute also,in a competitive manner, to the supply often-dollar watches. Suddenly, what hap-pened before happens again. The twentymillion have watches. The vacuum isfilled. Then someone says: “But there areone hundred million who would buywatches at two dollars.” So the process isrepeated, still lower in the pyramid. Thetwo-dollar watch is not a fine watch, butit will keep time; and as you would know,with the improvement that has taken placein machine practice the cost of making anykind of watch, even the finest, has beengreatly reduced. A watch ceases to be aluxury or a toktn of caste. It is a neces-sary part of man's personal equipment, allthe way down to the base of the pyramid.

There you have the cycle. The use of

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the machine is to cheapen the cost of pro-duction. The sign is quantity. When thesupply at a given price has overtaken theeffective demand you have either to idleyour machinery, in which ease your cost ofproduction will rise, or open a wider de-mand at a lower price. T o lower theprice and keep a profit you have to cheapenthe cost of production still more. Thisyou can do only by increasing the quantity,which again overtakes the demand, creat-ing again the same necessity to cheapen thecost by increasing the quantity in order tobe able to make a lower price for greaterdemand. Thus supply pursues demanddownward through the social structure.

There is at last a base to the pyramid—its very widest point. When that isreached — what? Well, then you needbazaars in a foreign sun, heathen races ofyour own to train up in the way of want-ing the products of your machines, newworlds of demand. You turn to foreigntrade. And if you are an aggressive coun-

[ 40 ]


try that has come late to this business, asGermany was, and find that most of thepromising heathen races are already adopt-ed and that all the best bazaar sites aretaken, you may easily work yourself intoa panic of fear and become a menace to thepeace.

t 4 i ]

IV

WHO MIND THEM OR STARVE

W H A T is it you will fear? That youwill be unable to sell away the surplusproduct of your machines? That industrywill be unable to make a profit?

No. The fear is that you will„starve.Your machines have called into existencemillions of people who otherwise wouldnot have been born—at least, not there inthat manner. These millions who mindmachines are gathered in cities. Theyproduce no food. They produce withtheir machines artificial things that areexchanged for food. It is usually the case,too, that they have to buy the raw mater-ials on which their machines act, as GreatBritain buys raw cotton from the UnitedStates and Egypt and wool from Australiato feed her great textile industries; havingmanufactured this material, she sends it

[42 ]

W H O MIND T H E M OR STARVE

forth again as cloth, to be exchanged forwheat in Canada and beef in SouthAmerica.

As you begin with machines your popu-lation divides. It becomes part rural andpart industrial, and so long as the ruralpart of it can feed the industrial partthere is no trouble. But a time soon comeswhen the need of the industrial workersfor sustenance is greater than the nativeproduction of food. This time inevitablycomes because the machines call up peopleso rapidly. Then you have to look abroadfor food. That means you have to go intoother countries—peasant countries—wherethere is a surplus of meat and grain, andexchange there your manufactured goodsfor food. And you begin to think andspeak of your economic necessity. ¾

There is no such necessity really. T oassert it is to say a preposterous thing,namely, that when your industrial popula-tion has increased beyond the native foodsupply, to a point at which you are out ofbalance, you are obliged to import food so

[ 4 3 ]

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that your industrial population may con-tinue to increase and your cities to growand your necessity to become greater andgreater in an endless spiral.

It cannot be endless. One of two thingswill determine the sequel. Either presentlythe resources of those peasant nations thatproduce a surplus of food will be exhaustedor they will in time think to become indus-trial nations, too, and eat their own sur-plus. There is no lucid reason why apopulation should not disperse as it beginsto exceed the native food supply—that isto say, migrate to the sources of food.

In this new political dogma of an abso-lute economic necessity to import food andraw materials in exchange for manufac-tures the ancient myth-wish reappears.The machine does not abolish the curse oftoil. It was not the escape men sought.But it does create a preferred task.

Traditionally, the peasant task has beendespised; it bore the curse direct. Andwhen the machine made it possible formany to embrace instead what was deemed

[44]


the lesser affliction of industrial labor gre-gariously performed in cities, the impulsethereto was headlong.

Hence the rise of that angular phe-nomenon called the industrial nation—anation able to buy its food, therefore de-livered fr.^rn the fate of peasantry andfor that reason entitled to consider itselfof higher caste than agricultural nations.

Hence the tumescent city as one of themost alarming appearances of our time.

Hence, also, that idea of economicnecessity, which, getting control of thepolitical mind of Europe, inevitably in-volved the world in a machine war. Whatmade that war so terrifying, so destructive,so extensive, was the power of the machine—an inconceivable power except as it dis-closed itself from day to day. No onebeholding the event from a firmamentalpoint of view could have supposed it was awar between races of men. Man in con-trast with the machines he served was piti-fully insignificant.

In Germany the task of bending the

[45]

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country's industrial equipment to the usesof war was assigned to a man who pos-sessed one of the very brilliant Jewishminds in the world. In him were com-bined the three high characteristics of hisrace, which are loyalty, intellectual real-ism, and dreaming imagination. His prac-tical job was more complex than that ofthe chief of staff. Yet his mind was notwholly occupied with this care. His criti-cal faculties and his imagination werealways free.

Reflecting on the economic meaning ofthe war, he was led to examine the essen-tial character of international trade, and soperceived clearly how wasteful, prepos-terous, and dangerous a great deal of itwas—Germany pressing the surplus pro-duct of her machines for sale in GreatBritain, the British doing likewise in Ger-many, both competing at home and abroadwith the industrial surplus of the UnitedStates, ships passing on the seas with cargoesof similar goods endlessly duplicated, andall the machine-craft nations seeking peas-

[46]


ant nations to be exploited for food inexchange for manufactures. I t was truein this way the world had been growingricher in things, and yet the cost wasfrightful. The resort to force was a con-fession that international trade was bank-rupt in reason and understanding.

He was competent to reach a conclusion,standing himself at the head of one ofEurope's great industries. And he made adream. It was that when the war hadcome to an end and people were them-selves again they would see the vital im-portance to civilization of dividing amongthem the work of the world agreeably totheir special aptitudes and the facts ofenvironment—those to produce a surplusof whatever it was they had a genius formaking and the materials ready; theseothers another kind of thing in which theirskill and situation gave them an advantage,and so on through the whole series ofnatural and artificial things with whichhuman wants are satisfied. Thus duplica-tion and strife would be eliminated. Not

[ 4 7 ]

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only would there be enough of everything;from the cease of senseless waste in pri-vate and public war there would be a sav-ing of power and capital sufficient to waterall the deserts of the earth and recreateman's vista here.

As a dream it was most alluring. As aplan it was worthless, for it contained twofatal assumptions, namely, that you couldalways find a Solomon to administer it andthat people would submit to the benevolenttyranny of his wisdom. He himself wasdestined by his end to illustrate how peoplereally behave. Shortly after the close ofthe war he was murdered in the name offanatic nationalism.

It was a sign.The war released a flood of repressed

passions in nationalism. Great and smallgroups of submerged people asserted rightsof self-determination and clothed them-selves with frontiers and nationhood.Nearly all of these, together also with oldcountries whose character until then hadbeen agricultural, were concurrently seized

[ 4 8 ]

}VHO MIND T H E M OR STARVE

with the thought of economic independ-ence—that is to say, with the thought ofhaving machines and industries of theirown, for they had seen a new thing. In-dustrial nations and none other were pow-erful in the world. Nations withoutmachines were helpless, subject, in fact, tothose that had them.

Enormously stimulated in its functionof reproduction by the onset of this humanidea, the machine broke bounds. No onenow has any control of it.

Only a few years ago Great Britainalone controlled it. She had a monopolyof its power and use by right of havingbeen the first to develop it, and she wasfor a while the only nation having a largesurplus of manufactures to sell in foreigncountries. Then came Germany,France,and Belgium. Of these Germany wasGreat Britain's most aggressive rival, mak-ing nearly all of the same things and mostof them cheaper. After 1870 the UnitedStates developed industry very fast, but fortwenty years more her exports were prin-

[49]

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cipally agricultural because she herselfconsumed the entire product of her ma-chines, besides importing manufacturedgoods from Europe in exchange for meatand grain and raw cotton. It was notuntil about ij8¤,o that American machineproducts began to invade the markets ofthe world in a large way. And at aboutthe same time JapajLappeared as an indus-trial nation, having in a few years equip-ped herself with Western machines andtrained her imitative hand to mind them.

Such, roughly, was the economic stateof the world at the outbreak of the war.|The powerfully industrialized nationswere four in Europe, counting little Bel-gium; one in the West and one in theEast—six altogether, representing hardlymore than one-fifth of the world's totalpopulation.

If we regard only the countries wherethe industrial population had so outrunthe native food supply that the sale ofmanufactures in foreign lands to pay forfood had either become, or was believed to

[ 5 0 ]


be, a vital transaction, then we count outthe United States. This country is stillself-nourished. That leaves only five, andthe competition among these five for mar-kets, for colonies, and heathen tribes to beinstructed in wanting, for private pathwaysby land and sea to the sources of food, foraccess to the raw materials required bytheir machines, was already desperate anddangerous. Between two of them it wasdeadly.

Even then it was so. Since then themachine has multiplied tremendouslywhere its habitat was and has gone migrat-ing, besides, all over the earth.

In those six countries that were alreadyintensively industrialized what appears?Their machine equipment has greatly in-creased. During the war it increased forobvious reasons. God was on the side ofthe most machines. Since the war it hascontinued to increase for other reasons.One reason was peculiar to Germany.There the building of furnaces, factories,and machine works by a dynastic method,

[ 5 1 ]

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as the pyramids were built, without creditor gold, simply by command of the indus-trialists over labor and material, was a wayof baffling the Allied creditors. Anotherreason was peculiar to France. Restoringthe industries of the devastated regionsmeant building them a second time, sincethey had been already once reproducedelsewhere in France during the war. Butthe reason over all lay in that fixed idea ofeconomic necessity, not changed in theleast by anything that had happened, onlynow more desperate than ever, owing bothto the intensified competition of the oldercountries among themselves and to thespread of the machine into other countries.

How the competition among themselvesìías been intensified may be illustrated inthe case of textiles as between Great Bri-tain and France. Before the war bothimported raw cotton and exported fabrica-tions of cotton; but whereas Great Britainexported principally the cotton cloth ofuniversal commerce, France exported spe-cial products representing her genius for

[ 5 2 ]


style and artistry. Now, however, havingmade large additions to her general tex-tile equipment, France feels obliged tocompete directly with Great Britain incotton cloth of common commerce. Todo this she must extend her foreign tradeparallel to Great Britain's and divide themarkets hitherto dominated by the British.As with cotton cloth, so with other manu-factures, particularly those of iron andsteel, wherein France proposes to competeand is equipped to compete with both Ger-many and Great Britain as never before.Each step she takes in this direction aug-ments her economic necessity, for nowalmost the last thing you would expect tosee in France is taking place. The nativepopulation as a whole is static, but its char-acter is changing. The industrial part ofit is growing; the agricultural part is wan-ing. People are deserting the fields toembrace industrial life—to mind machines.In every city there is a housing problem;public credit is employed to build smalldwellings for the wage earners; yet in the

[53]

OÜROBOROS

country, two hours from Paris, you willsee houses empty and going to ruin, wholerural villages in the way to be abandoned,vineyards perishing for want of care, fieldsgoing to grass instead of grain. Their in-dustrial power is rising; their agriculturalpower is falling. Before the war theywere, or might have been, self-nourishingon their own soil, like the people of theUnited States. That precious security theycast away. In place of it they take on theanxieties of empire. They must imposeupon Morocco the blessings of Europeancivilization ia order to have an outlet therefor the surplus of their machines.

Dramatic are the migrations of the,ma-chine and not unlike the migrations ofnatural species, men and beasts, in. searchof food. The machine seeks either cheaperraw material or people to mind its proc-esses.

There is Italy, with a population greaterthan that of France, growing half a mil-lion a year. I t is the most fecund race inEurope. Suddenly the Italians come awake

[54 ]


and are resolved upon an industrial career.Before the war this thought was dimamong them. In the crisis it took shape.Since the war it has become an enthusiasmand now smoke towers are rising very fast.Definitely they have turned their mindsfrom agriculture to industry, not merelyin order that they may become self-suppliedwith manufactures instead of buying themfrom other countries with lemons andolive oil but in order to grow rich andpowerful in foreign trade. They proposehereafter and progressively to exchangemachine wares for food. Italy will be aformidable rival for Great Britain, Ger-many, France, and Belgium. They arealready beginning to feel it.

Poland perceives her destiny to be in-dustrial ; she has already a large surplus ofmanufactured goods to sell. LikewiseCzechoslovakia. These are instances ofnew countries. Spain and Greece are im-porting machinery, and Spain is so anxiousto develop industry that she considers pay-ing a bounty out of the public treasury on

[55]

OUROBOROS

exports of textiles. India, whose historiceconomic function had been to send rawcotton to Great Britain and buy cottoncloth from Manchester, now consumeshalf her own raw cotton in her nativemills; she not only satisfies three-quartersof her own want for cotton cloth but isbeginning actually to export that com-modity, even to the United States. Thiswill seem very wistful, indeed, when youpause to set it against the historical back-ground of the United States. For a longtime we exported raw cotton and importedcotton cloth. That was to have been thepattern of our economic life as a Britishcolony; we were to produce only rawmaterials, ship them to Great Britain andbuy from her the surplus of her machines.We were forbidden, in fact, to weavecloth for sale or to have iron mills. Nowwe are an industrial nation; we consumemore and more of our own raw cotton andexport enormous quantities of cotton cloth.Ultimately we shall have no raw cotton at

[56]

W H O MIND T H E M OR STARVE

all to sell; our mills will require the wholeof our annual crop; we shall have nothingbut cotton cloth to sell. To whom shallwe sell it? Not to the Indians; they wishto make their own. Probably not to theEgyptians. The Japanese manufacturersof cotton goods have recently invaded theEgyptian market that was formerly GreatBritain's own, and are underselling theBritish there. You would think Chinawould be Japan's natural outlet for cottongoods. So it is. The difficulty is that Japanmust be looking further because China isbeginning to supply herself.

The Chinese instance is poignant. Afew years ago—until the war, in f a c t -China exported food and raw materialsand imported manufactured goods—noth-ing else to speak of either way. This wasas the Western industrial nations wished itto be. So anxious were they to have it sothat they bound China by treaty not to puttariff barriers against the goods they wishedto sell in the Chinese markets, except by

[57 ]

OUROBOROS

mutual consent—that is to say, with theirconsent.

The war suspended this thralldom. TheChinese imported machines and began tomake their own things, especially cloth.Power looms appeared as by magic. Andafter the war they continued to appear.During three years after the war the num-ber trebled, and in 1922 the table ofChinese imports and exports presented astrange face. Among her imports weremachines and machine parts; also semi-manufactured goods to be finished inChinese factories. And one-fifth of hertotal exports consisted of manufacturedgoods. China an exporter of machineproducts!

And so up and down the earth. In Bra-,zil, where there was hardly any visible

production of artificial things before 1914,the whole outlook has changed. Thatcountry now is able from her own ma-chines to meet the whole of her want formatches, textiles, footgear, wall paper,

[58]


phonograph discs, hardware, hats, and play-ing cards, and will soon be self-suppliedwith practically everything she needs.

The colonial system that was to haveanswered forever Great Britain's need forraw materials and food in exchange formachine products will not hold in thatcharacter. In India the revolt is political jelsewhere it is peaceably economic. Canadais already powerfully machined; she is ex-porting motor cars. Australia, going inthe same direction, is beginning to exportshoes. The Union of South Africa takessteps to subsidize local industry. Irelandno sooner gains control of her economiclife than she puts a tariff wall around her-self to limit the sale of foreign goods,meaning British goods as well, thinkingthereby to foster infant industries.

Well, everyone now is doing that. Theold industrial countries, too, are protectingthemselves against one another's goods, thelast to come to it being Great Britain her-self. For more than half a century she

[ 5 9 ]

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was the protagonist of free trade, abhoringtariffs, because she was paramount in ma-chine craft and could beat her rivals bothin their own markets and in her own. Thatadvantage having departed from her, sheis driven to tariff protection; she puts upbarriers against other people's goods if theyare too cheap, because they are too cheap,and calls it safeguarding home industries.

[60]

THE PARADOX OF SURPLUS

W H A T does it mean? Can there be toomany desirable and useful things? Canthings be too cheap? You would say no.Surely, so long as any human want re-mains unsatisfied, things cannot be eithertoo plentiful or too cheap. But there isanother dimension.

Everything that is not still or deadmust exist in a state of rhythmic’ tension.It is true of the plant, it is true of theanimal, it is true of each race of plantsand each race of animals, it is true of thekingdom of plants against the kingdom ofanimals. It is true of people, as individ-uals, as races, as a species. And it is true,also, of the machine.

In the living organism growth of tissueat a normal rate consonant with therhythm is vital. A wild growth of that

[ 6 1 ]

OUROBOROS

same tissue will be fatal. In the aggregateof jife there is equilibrium among mil-lions of different forms7~5¾ch form striv-ing but never succeeding to dispossessevery other form and take the world. Theoyster, if unhindered, would displace everyother living thing on the earth in maybeten generations and then, of course, perishfor want of space in which to containitself. What hinders the oyster and at thesame time preserves it is that principle oftension jn nature without which it wouldbe impossible* for innumerable forms andvarieties of life, the relations of which toone another are reciprocal, neutral, hostile,anonymous, to exist together all in onegreat taut pattern.

Now regard the third kingdom, artifi-cial, implanted with mechanical beasts,that contains civilization. Life in this en-vironment is economic. Its characteristicbehaviour is a progressive differentiationof labor. Tasks are divided and sub-divided until, at length, there are count-

[ 6 2 ]

T H E PARADOX OF SURPLUS

less separate groups of people, each oneperforming a singular function to whichit is trained and tending to become unableto perform any other. The subdivisionsare beyond enumeration. They multiplyso fast that the book of the census cannotkeep up with them.

The shoe industry, for example, doesnot consist in shoemakers. You mightsearch it in vain for a shoemaker—that is,one who should know how to raise a pairof shoes from flat leather. In the shoefactory the material passes through a trainof machines. Each machine is minded byan operative who performs one little spe-cialized part of the work in endless mul-tiple. The product is shoes by thousandsof gross.

But who determines what kinds of shoeand how many shoes shall be made? Whatbecomes of them when they are made?Who knows they can be sold? What ifthey are not saleable?

If you address these questions to one of[63]

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the operatives minding a machine you willfind him dumb. He knows only his ownfunction.

It is very complicated. There are twoindustries here. One is the shoe jndustiy;the other is the shoe machine industry.One could not exist without the other, yetthey are separate and very unlike. Theshoe industry itself, that has dispensedwith shoemakers, will have a finance de-partment, an economic department, a buy-ing department, a department of produc-tion science, a style and designing depart-ment, a chemical department, a departmentof distribution, a sales department, an ad-vertising department, and others we do notthink of. I t is all about shoes. These areall shoe people. They agglomerate inshoe towns. They think shoes. The worldis a foot. The more it can be shod thebetter. They live by shoes.

But to do this they must be able to ex-change shoes for the things they want.Shoes, therefore, must have a relation ofvalue to every other thing in the economic

[64]

T H E PARADOX O F SURPLUS

world. It follows that, in order to havethis exchange value, shoes must have alsoa relation of quantity to all other things.If for any reason the production of shoesbecomes suddenly abnormal that exchangevalue is lost. It is like one kind of tissuegrowing wild in the organism. Shoes arenecessary; but an excessive quantity cannotbe absorbed by the economic body. Therewill be in that case a morbid pathology inthe shoe industry, unemployment in theshoe town, despair among the shoe people,many of whom have never learned to doanything else. Left to themselves, withoutshoes to make, they might even starve.

It may be in the same way a soap town,a textile town, a garment town, an irontown, a motor town like Detroit, a rubbertire town like Akron, a furniture town likeGrand Rapids. It may be all of these—that is to say, industry as a whole, increas-ing its output at an abnormal rate. As youproject the thought you begin to see, first,the vital importance of rhythm, equil-ibrium, tension, in the realm of industry,

OUROBOROS

and then the inverse meaning of a suddencompetitive increase in the machine powerof the world.

Ask the Italians what it means. Theyare an old people coming to it with a freshmind. The conversation that follows tookplace in February, 1925. Talking are, onone side, the Italian Minister of Finance,and, on the other, a visiting journalist:

“The industrial idea is new in Italy. I tis since the war. You had a clean slate.You could have done anything you had theimagination to do. First you might havemade a scientific survey of Italy's latentgenius and resources, and then you mighthave thought of producing goods thatshould be uniquely Italian and thereforenon-competitive. But what have youdone? You have gone in for the greatstaples of world commerce, such as cot-ton and woolen textiles, artificial silk, andmotor cars. Don't you see that in doingthis you take on the competition of GreatBritain, Germany, France, Belgium, theUnited States?”

[ 6 6 ]


“Yes, we see that.”“Those countries have the field and the

experience and better access than Italy tosources of raw material.”

“That we know, also.”“Then how can you hope successfully

to compete with them? What have youthat they have not? What advantageagainst theirs?”

“One you haven't thought of.”“What is it?””A man can live on less in Italy than

anywhere else. We don't know why thatis. It may be the way the sun shines onhim. But it is a fact. That is our ad-vantage. With that we shall succeed.”

“Do you realize what that means? Youare saying that Italy proposes to found anindustrial career on the lowest terms ofhuman existence. Your people will notaccept it.”

“But they will.”“How do you know they will?”“Because they will do anything sooner

than starve.”

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What a finish for the morning hope ofthe machine age!—if it were. Monoton-ous tending of the machine on the loweststandard of living; alternative, starvation.

Suppose it were true. Suppose the Italianpeople did accept the terms and acquiredthe knack and skill. Then Italian manu-factures, being cheaper than any other,would sweep the markets of the world.The older industrial nations—Great Bri-tain, Germany, France, the United States,et al.—could protect their domestic mar-kets by tariff barriers, but they would findthemselves losing their foreign markets tothe Italians. For such industrial countriesas are obliged to exchange a machinesurplus abroad for food the loss of foreignmarkets would be fatal. They would haveto meet the Italian competition. Theywould have to say, as the Italians now aresaying: “It is that or starve.” Theywould have to let down the standard ofliving to meet Italy's wage cost. Thiswould oblige Italy to make her standard

[ 6 8 ]


lower still, and thus, in a cycle, until all ofthem were sunk in misery.

And this is by no means an impossibleprogression of events. It has once takenplace on a lesser scale. Beginning about1870 there was a sudden and uncontrol-able increase in the output of industryfrom two principal causes. One was therapid rise, of competitive industry in Ger-many and the United States; the other —much more potent—was the discovery ofa new and cheaper way of making steel.This one discovery transformed the aspectof industry by increasing its potentialpower as much, perhaps, as one~hundredfold. Until then people spoke of the ironage; after that it was the steel age. Fora quarter of a century prices fell continu-ously, while solemn economic bodies satpondering the phenomena. In that timeall the capital employed in industry waslost at least once, probably twice or threetimes. The producer's only hope was toimprove his machines and increase produc-

[ 6 9 ]

OUROBOROS

tion, for as he did that his cost per unit felland for a little while he could undersellhis competitor. In methods of productionand in the efficiency of machines therewas necessarily amazing progress; never-theless, when all other means of reducingcosts had failed, it had to be taken out oflabor. In the United States it was not sobad because here the domestic demand-formanufactures was unlimited, and a tariffwall protected industry from foreign com-petition. In Germany it was very bad.

Germany then was where Italy now is.Her advantage was that the German people .would work harder and longer for less ·money than the British. The competitionwas between these two. The British Gov-ernment, disturbed by her new rival's suc-cess in foreign trade, made a study oflabor conditions in Germany. It foundSunday labor very prevalent in the fac-tories. “Only the hours of divine serviceare excluded,” said a report from Saxony.

Commenting, the London Economistsaid: “The question of Sunday labor is one

Í7oJ

T H E PARADOX O F SURPLUS

of considerable interest for England, forit is unquestionable that among the causesof Germany's ability to compete with Eng-land as a mercantile and industrial coun-try the fact that here more hours areworked for less money is not the least im-portant. The prohibition of Sunday laborwould, of course, mean increased cost ofproduction, and every increase in the costof production will render it more difficultfor Germany to outrival older manufac-turing countries in the markets of theworld.”

What might have happened does notdetain us. What did happen was very for-tunate.

First, the food supply from free virginland in North and South America in-creased at the same time in a prodigiousmanner, so that notwithstanding the wildenergy of the machine the equilibriumbetween agriculture and industry wasfairly well maintained.

Second, there was still room in theworld for colonial development on a vast

[ 7 1 ]

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scale. This occurred, and the outletsthereby created for the surplus product ofmachines were most timely.

Third — and this is very important —finance, to save itself from deluge, gotcontrol of industry. It was unable to buyindustry out. All the banks in the worldhad not money enough to do that. Thisapparently insuperable difficulty it solvedin a simple manner. It formed industryby groups into great joint stock corpora-tions anïsold the stock to the public. Andalthough generally finance did not keepcontrol in a literal sense, it did so center itas to make the management responsivethereafter to financial counsel. Theclassic instance in the United States wasthe formation of the Steel Trust, whichwas in very earnest a measure of despera-tion. The steel-making machine had be-come a demon whose pastime was panic.By this feat of finance, which occurred inall industrial countries, a new rhythm wasestablished. It was most imperfect; abso-lute control of production was impossible.

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But panics from over-production werethereafter episodic, not continuous, andthis was a great improvement.

And now a second time the machine hasgot away. But how much more power-ful it is and widely planted than before.The industrial capacity of the UnitedStates alone is greater than that of allEurope twenty-five years ago. There areno more such virgin continents as Northand South America to be exploited forfood; and, besides, countries that werethen content to play an agricultural part*exchanging meat and grain and raw mater-ials for machine-made wares, now are re-solved to have industries of their own—nay! more, to have an industrial surplusfor sale abroad, engaging in that gamethemselves. Colonies are no longer docile.And as to finance, there is little proba-bility that it will be able again to lay itshand upon the throttle. There are severalreasons why.

The significance of industry haschanged. Formerly it was a private affair

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in which the state was but dimly concerned,and so concerned only in a social sense,whereas now the idea of industry is basi-cally political. It associates with tnoughts•of~security, independence in all circum-stances, national welfare, power, andgrandeur. A factory is like aship,to beprivately enjoyed in time of peace subjectto mobilization for war. The war didthat. Great Britain now subsidizes so-called key industries as before she subsi-dized ships under the eye of the Admiraltyif they were so built as to be easily con-verted into cruisers. All this is beyond thecontrol of finance.

For another reason, there are signs thatindustry in the future is more likely tocommandíînaneetnan finance is to domin-ate industry.

By finance it shall be understood thatwe mean organized influence — in short,banking. Its occult authority has beenseriously impaired. The high day of itspriestcraft is gone.

Formerly it was consulted in war. You

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could not manage a war without a gold:chest; it was the banker who said whetherthat could be filled or not. Now one ofthe first steps you take in case of war is to^suspend the bank, declare a moratoriumand print paper money to pass from handto hand.

When the world war started it was theopinion of finance, that it could not lastabove ninety áays> it could not be financedbeyond that limit. I t lasted four years,and did not stop then for want of money.

After the war international finance wasmorally powerless to prevent the colossalmark swindle, Germany printing and sell-ing all over the earth billions of papermarks that were to be flatly repudiated.Nor was it able to visit the slightest pen-alty upon the authors of this financialenormity, for immediately afterward itwas obliged, on political grounds, to floata large gold loan for Germany and therebyrestore her to solvency and credit. InGermany finance was unable to preventthe industrial dynasts from appropriating

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to themselves all the middle-class wealththat was invested in bonds, mortgages,annuities, and savings banks; they simplyborrowed it and then paid it back in worth-less paper money.

It is very significant, this humiliation offinance. In situations where the politicalwill is dominant and in those where eco-nomic forces act alone the omens are thesame. Henry Ford is the extraordinaryinstance of an industrialist who proceedswithout benefit of finance. He creates hiscapital as he goes along; what he does notcreate he commands. He does not borrow.

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So now what will happen? From theexcessive power already existing to pro-duce industrial commodities, from thecontinued increase of that power never-theless for political and national reasons,from the raising of trade barriers by onenation against another because every onefears the effect upon its own industries ofreceiving cheap goods from another, fromthis running of people out of the fields totend more machines, from the amazinggrowth of urban tissue in the economicbody—from all of this what follows?

/ ` The Italians suggest a bitter competitionin terms of living, those to survive whowill accept most patiently and at the low-est wage the drudgery of minding ma-chines. That might go rather far; ulti-mately it comes to absurdity. To whom

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at last should they sell thek-^uods? Notto the impoverished workers of other in-dustrial countries, defeated in the struggle.To whom else ì To the agricultural coun-tries? But these, for the reasons we haveseen, are tending as such to disappear.They are buying machines. Italy bringsnothing to the solution. She is merelycoming tardily to do what others have doneto excess.

A brilliant Belgian economist suggeststhat only the most efficient equipment willsurvive, and only enough of that to satisfythe natural demand for goods. All therest must be abandoned because there willbe no profit in working it. Well, it re-mains to be seen if people will abandontheir machines without a struggle,pürelyfor rational reasons. Much more is itlikely that tne higher cost of working theless efficient equipment will be compen-sated by a lower wage rate, unemploymentbeing the workers' alternative. Moreover,if all the inefficient and unnecessary ma-chines were scrapped that would mean only

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to postpone the sequel. The competitionwould begin all over again. ” ^ ¯

There-are those who suggest that weare facing toward the mercantile system of )the Middle Ages, when it was the custom \for each nation jealously to protect itshome markets from the competitive handi-crafts of other nations and to prohibit orpunitively tax the exportation of raw ma-terial to rival countries. So we are. Tosay it is merely to indicate the rock uponwhich, if nothing happens, the ship of tradeis bound to wreck herself.

A growing light on the actions of tradeas it is organized by the industrial powersnow impels nations hitherto agriculturalto found industries of their own. As pro-ducers of foodstuffs and raw materials tobe exchanged for machine products theycame to have a sense of being exploited.In academic theory this was an exchangeby which the industrial nation satisfied itsfood wants and the agricultural nation itsindustrial wants, to mutual advantage.But how came the industrial nation also to

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acquire wealth by the transaction? Per-forming the preferred industrial task, itgot not only its food but a profit over.What else could it mean that after a seriesof years the industrial nation should cometo have large interest-bearing investmentsin the agricultural country, owning itsrailroads, tramways, water works, andbanks? What else could it mean that therichest country in foreign investments wasthe one that had been for the longest timeengaged in exchanging the surplus productof its machines for the food and rawmaterials of other countries? How wasit that those other countries, after havingserved her for many years with food andraw materials, invariably owed her a greatdeal of money? Or, if you approach itfrom the other point of view, you find inthe economic literature of industrial na-tions a certain finished doctrine, which isthat the exchange of manufactured goods-for food and raw materials is a businessthat pays. It is not primarily a vital trans-action. It becames vital by extension —

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that is to say, when in the course of timethe industrial population has increased be-yond the native food supply. But in thebeginning the motive is gain. Nakedly, itis an exchange of skilled labor for un-skilled labor, to the enrichment of theformer; it is a division ; f labor amongnations on a kind of caste plan.

There is much to be said for it. In no<other way could civilization have beenspread so fast; by no other method couldthe world have become so rich in a fewyears; There was much to be said, also,for piracy. It diffused manners,customs,and wealth; it made peoples acquaintedwith one another, it made a flat worldround, and laid the foundations of moderncommerce. In the modern case all diffi-culty begins when the peoples to whom theless profitable tasks have been allotted be-come intelligently dissatisfied and resolveto change their status, as the Americancolonists did, as the Japanese did, as nowall lusty nations are doing, last of all theChinese.

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Modern trade evolved from piracy.There was a time when all transfer ofgoods between nations was by joyous might..It is pleasant to believe that the cause ofthe decline of piracy was a rise in themoral sense of mankind. It is more likelyto have been the other way—that as piracydeclined for rational reasons rules to gov-ern commercial conduct became necessary.To enforce the rules became everyone'sduty. T o break them was punishable.From this would germinate a moral sense.Piracy was bound to fail. On a large scale,continuous and competitive, it simply wasnot feasible. Competition ruined it.

There was a marginal time in whichone was either pirate or trader, agreeablyto circumstance. The early Greek in hisdangerous ship never knew which hewas; nor did anyone else. He took whenthe taking was good; when it was not, hebartered. The Romans finally abolishedpiracy in the Mediterranean, but on thehigh seas it was the great romantic enter-prise down to a very recent time. Some

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of its heroes are venerated as daring navi-gators, pathbreakers of empire. I t takessome effort to remember that trees are stillstanding that were already old when theworld was a place where finding was keep-ing. If what you found was in the pos-session of savages or heathens, you ex-changed for it the hope of civilization,maybe a few glass beads. Toward theend, this wonderful business began to behedged about with restrictions. You hadto be careful not to take anything forciblyfrom people who had treaties of amity withyour own country, for if you did theymade trouble for you at home, diplomati-cally, and you might even be hanged at theend of an otherwise glorious voyage.

But if you swindled them in trade, thatwas all right. Naturally, the first theoryof trade was to give the least and get themost. There was else no point to it.

The significance of trade has fundamen-tally changed in our time. What was aprivate adventure has become a nationalnecessity, vital to the existing form of the

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principal industrial states of the world.ÄñlTyef that first rude theory of it, repre-senting the step from piracy to commerce,universally survives. This, at last, is thecrucial fact.

It has been impossible to part with thenotion that there must be gain in trade—aprofit on one side beyond the mutual satis-faction of unlike wants with unlike goods.Hence the term, balance of trade, meaningthe balance in your favor, or against you,from the transactions of commerce. Therule is that the industrial nations come outeach year with a balance in their favor.The countries with whom they have beenexchanging machine-made goods for foodand raw materials owe them money. Thissimply means that the industrial nationscharge more for what they sell than theypay for what they buy. Hence the gain.That is how they get rich. It is more thana rule: it is the very principle of trade;and if you say there is any other principlethe commercial mind becomes instantly

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stark. What would activate trade if notthe hope of gain?

Nevertheless, trade on that principle isbound to fail, as piracy failed, and for thesame practical reason. On a vast scale,with unlimited participation, it is not con-tinuously feasible. Every nation cannothave a favorable trade balance. So longas three or four nations had a monopolyof machines and machinecraft it could bemanaged; it could even assume such col-ossal proportions as to create the illusionof being permanent as the way of theworld. That monopoly is broken. Themachine is increasingly a common pos-session. Its power is dispersed and thereis much new and unbidden ecstasy in theexercise of it. And whereas it was that afew nations exploited many, what nowopens to view is the prospect of all nationssimultaneously engaged in the effort to ex-ploit one another. Every frontier a tradewall. Each nation forbidding others to dounto it that which it is bent upon doing to

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them. So we return to the middle of thesixteenth century, no wiser than the Britishwere when the Parliament voted “An ActAvoiding Divers Foreign Wares Made byHandicraftsmen Beyond the Seas (5 Eliz.c. 7, Statutes of the Realm, Vol. IV, PartI, †p. 428 -429) , 1562.” I t reads:

Whereas heretofore the artificers of thisrealm of England (as well within the city ofLondon as within other cities, towns andboroughs of the same real) that is to wit,girdlers, cutlers, saddlers, glovers, point-mak-ers, and such like handicraftsmen, have beenin the said faculties greatly wrought, andgreatly set on work, as well for the sustenta-tion of themselves, their wives and families,as for a good education of a great part of theyouth of this realm in good art and laudibleexercise:

Yet notwithstanding so now it is, that byreason of the abundance of foreign waresbrought into this realm from the parts ofbeyond the seas, the said artificers are not onlyless occupied, and thereby utterly impover-ished, the youth not trained in the said sciences

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and exercises, and thereby the said facultiesand the exquisite knowledges thereof like inshort time within this realm to decay; but alsodivers cities and towns within this realm ofEngland much thereby impaired, the wholerealm greatly endamaged and other countriesgreatly enriched.

For reformation whereof, be it enacted byour sovereign lady the Queen's Highness, andby the Lord Spiritual and Temporal, and theCommons of this present parliament assembledand by the authority of the same, that no per-son or persons whatsoever, from or after thefeast of the Nativity of St. John Baptist nownext ensuing, shall bring or cause to be broughtinto this realm of England from the partsof beyond the seas, any girdles, harness forgirdles, rapiers, daggers, knives, hilts, pummels,lockets, chapes, dagger-blades, handles, scab-bards, and sheaths for knives, saddles, horse-harness, stirrups, bits, gloves, points, leatherlaces or pins, being ready made or wroughtin any parts of beyond the seas, to be sold,bartered or exchanged within this realm ofEngland or Wales; upon pain to forfeit allsuch wares so to be brought contrary to the

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true meaning of this act, in whose handssoever they or any of them shall be found,or the very value thereof.

Shall it be either this again, or from auniversal war of machine competition thesurvival of one titanic industrial nationwith a monopoly of, foreign trade and themight to force its surplus goods on otherpeople's markets? That nation would fallin time and hot altogether from its ownweight. I t would, of course, abuse itspower; but moreover it would be unableto collect its favorable trade balances fromall the rest of the world.

Logical extremes are fictions of thought.It is always another thing that happens.The one impossibility is for trade to wearin its present character. It has come to theend of its theory, witness the dread withwhich European statesmen, economists, andindustrialists regard the payment of Ger-man reparations. How shall Germanypay? In goods. There is no other way.She cannot pay in gold. There is not that

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much gold in the whole world. TheAllied creditors actually lend her a littlegold in order that she may recover fromher amazing act of bankruptcy and getback to the way of producing exportablewealth. But to whom shall she deliver hergoods, or sell them? Great Britain doesnot want them. Her anxiety is how tokeep her own factories going. They makethe same goods. France does not wishthem, nor Belgium, nor Italy nor theUnited States, and all for the same reason.They have a potential surplus of industrialcommodities from their own machines.Then shall Germany sell her good in othermarkets and turn the money proceeds overto Great Britain, France, et al? But theythemselves need those other markets onwhich to sell their own industrial products.German competition is not wanted there.Thus an impasse.

If in desperation the Allied creditors for-gave Germany her reparation debt, or somuch of it as she should be obliged to payin competitive goods, that would be still

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worse.\ For Germany would then competein those other markets on her own initia-tive and keep the profìt.\ And all the timethose other markets, in Asia, Africa, SouthAmerica, tend to become less and less ex-ploitable because they belong to people whohave begun to found industries of theirown and are in the way to be natively sup-plied with manufactures.

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I T must occur to you that what theworld requires to find is a new conceptionof commerce among nations—one thatshall be free of the predatory impulse,above the exploiting motive, competitive insome nobler sense. It need not be mag-nanimous or unselfish—not yet—but onlyenlightened enough to comprehend the lat-ter meaning of events.

For a superseding principle the perfectpattern is represented in nature, where yousee dissimilar organisms existing togetherin a state of symbiosis, one sustaining theother, vitally interdependent, yet neitherexploiting the other.

There is no accrual of advantage to oneside, no gain, no favorable balance oftrade. One gives exactly as much as it re-

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ceives and two wants are equally satisfied,with nothing to boot either way.

This is very different from parasitism,which is one-sided, for gain only. Andthere is a very curious suggestion that or-ganisms now existing together in a state ofpermanent symbiotic union were once para-sitic and learned better.

I t cannot be supposed that nations willever deliberately substitute a principle ofmutualism for the principle of gain intrade. They could not if they would.Those that have the advantage must fightfor it to the end. (Commerce itself, if youlook to it, is a complex structure of growthfor which there is nowhere any originalaccountability. \ I t cannot change its phil-osophy, any more than a tree, for it hasnone. It has instead a vital instinct foropportunity and a flexible way with neces-sity and circumstance. There is no hopeof its being reformed ideally by mass in-telligence. The conglomerate mind is ir-responsibly, impersonally selfish; it cannotact without experience. There is no ex-

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perience of peoples sustaining one anotheron a sympathetic plan, each willing to giveas much as it takes, with no balance favor-able or unfavorable to be settled in gold ordebt. This has never happened. It is anidea only.

But if now we move our point of viewfrom the center to the circumference weshall see already taking place, with theforce of natural events, momentous altera-tions in the scheme of economic life—oneof decay and one of revaluation.

We witness almost unawares the ruin ofthat classic enterprise of empire which isfounded upon the theory of a balance oftrade and a division of labor whereby thecolonies, the dominions, the subject andmanadated peoples are hewers, drawers,and food-bringers, serving those who livein cities, practice machine craft, and thinkthemselves wholly benevolent.

The machine has betrayed it. Nothingmore unexpected has occurred since thediscovery of a simple chemical reaction thatwas to destroy the privileged warriof caste

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among mankind. When a splendid knightin armor was powerless against the peasantwith a musket and a knight with a musketno better than a peasant, the romantic pro-fession of arms was doomed. Gunpowderended the age of chivalry. Ultimate mili-tary power passed to the people.

And now for hundreds of millions ofpeople hitherto inferior in status the ma-chine is a symbol of liberation, freedom,independence, recognition, racial power.Japan is the thrilling example in Asia. Didit not deliver her from a thralldom im-posed by the Western Powers in the inter-est of their own trade? Did it not makeher in one generation their equal, a nationto be feared? Certainly for these reasonsuse and possession of the machine will in-crease in the world beyond any naturaleconomic ratio, and both the power andprofit of empire will cease.

The other alteration, already beginningto be visible though not yet adequatelyunderstood, is a change in the value offood. Three causes henceforth will be

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operating together to make food dear.First, as cities continue to grow and theindustrial population of the earth continuesto augment faster than the agriculturalpopulation, the need to import food willbe always greater; second, the exportablesurplus of food will be always less becauseas the agricultural and low-craft nationsprogress toward their ideal of industrialindependence they will consume more andmore of their own food products; andthird, the supply of those industrial com-modities that are exchanged for food willenormously increase.

In the language of the economist, theagricultural index will rise and the indus-trial index will fall. I t will require agreater quantity of manufactures to buy abushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheatto buy a manufactured article. This willnot be for one year or two. It will belasting. It will affect the status of greatgroups and classes of people. In the citiesand industrial centers the cost of livingwill move in a vertical manner.

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The difficulties of food-importing coun-tries may, almost certainly will, becomedesperate. The people of Great Britain,for example, will pay dearly for the wealththey have amassed by industry in the lastseventy-five years. If the value of food,priced in British machine wares, shoulddouble, then for the same quantity of foodas before they would have to give twicethe quantity of manufactured goods, whichwould mean twice as much labor and nomore to eat. The same difficulties willbeset all countries not self-contained infood. They will exhort their people toreturn to the fields, which the people willbe loath to do, having tasted cities. Theywill expect their governments to makefood cheaper by edict, or to buy it out oftaxation and distribute it gratis. Moreover,in some countries, taking again the case ofGreat Britain as notable, there may not beenough land. The people perhaps couldnot feed themselves no matter how inten-sively they worked their fields, industryhaving multiplied the population beyond

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the utmost potentiality of a native foodsupply. Obviously indicated is a move-ment of dispersal together with a limita-tion upon the increase of industrial popu-lation. More power will pass to coun-tries like the United States, Canada, Braziland Australia that have the advantage ofenormous food reserves. Their problemswill be internal.

None of this can happen without muchblind and violent resistance. But, ofcourse, it will not happen all at once, notall in one place, nor in every case with aclear meaning. And it is not certain thatany amount of experience, however pain-ful, will bring nations to adopt what wehave called a symbiotic principle of com-merce with one another. There is at firstthe danger that agriculture in its turn willexploit industry as industry has exploitedpeasantry and that those who possess orcontrol resources of food and raw ma-terials will hold them too dear, therebytaking the industrial nations into their debtor provoking them to insane measures.

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Thus the opportunity to go forwardmight be lost in passion. The fate of re-trogression is possible. This has happenedmany times. It is much less probable than,ever before, however, for many reasonsthat seem permanent. When knowledgewas a precious torch borne aloft by a fewhands through storm and stress, it waseasily quenched. Then darkness. Youcan hardly imagine destruction of the ex-isting body of science, technology, andfact-knowledge. The mass of it is toogreat to be lost.

That, of course, has nothing to do withwisdom. By knowledge alone man mightextinguish himself utterly. But to supposethat he will not find a new way to go onwith, that he will either move the oldstruggle to new ground or return tomedievalism, is to believe there is no lawof human progress.

The probability is that he will find theway unknowingly, by groping, and willbe well upon it before he has had time

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to formulate any clear idea or theory ofwhat he is doing. He will have foundlittle by little that it pays, better than anyother way, not as’ he once understoodprofit, but in terms of enduring satisfac-tions, which may include peace. Criticalunderstanding of it will come later withreflection, and as it comes he will rid hismind of the phantasy in pursuit of whichhe has made the world so much richer inthings than in happiness.

Seeing now only how relentlessly thecurse pursues him still and how the afflic-tion of monotonous toil if it be lifted inone place is made heavier in another, he istorn with a sense of frustration. But theview is wrong—false to his first nature. Heforgets the truth of his own myth. Some-where down the ages it got turned upsidedown. Once he dwelt in the Garden ofEden, or supposed he did, and cared notfor it. He was bored there and beguiledto his fall. The figure at the gate for-bidding his return is a symbol of self-

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knowledge; it was set there by his ownforethought, lest he should be tempted togo back.

If the machine with which he has be-lieved himself to be storming a childishwish ever brought him to a state of effort-less ease on earth, that would be his last.

It may be a power he is yet morally un-prepared to exercise. How strange at leastthat with an incentive so trivial and naivein itself he should have been able to per-form an absolute feat of creation!

The machine was not. He reached hismind into emptiness and seized it. Evenyet he cannot realize what he has done.Out of the free elemental stuff of the uni-verse, visible and invisible, some of it im-ponderable, such as lightning, he has in-vented a class of typhonic, mindless organ-isms, exempt from the will of nature.

We have no understanding of crea-tion, its process or meaning. The ma-chine is the externalized image of man'sthoughts. It is furthermore an extensionof his life, for we perceive as an economic

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fact that human existence in its presentphase,ön its present scale, could not con-tinue in its absence. And what are we our-selves, life to begin with, if not an imageof thought? Perhaps it is true as a prin-ciple of creation that the image and itscreator must co-exist, inseparably.

In any light, man's further task isJovian. That is to learn how best to livewith these powerful creatures of his mind,how to give their fecundity a law and theirfunctions a rhythm, how not to employthem in error against himself—since hecannot live without them.

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