press, were all conquests of the tangible and visible forces of Nature.

With Watt's utilization of steam vapour as a motive power, man suddenly
passed into a new and portentous chapter of his varied history.
Thenceforth, he was to multiply his powers a thousandfold by the
utilization of the invisible powers of Nature--such as vapour and
electricity. This prodigious change in his powers, and therefore his
environment, has proceeded with ever-accelerating speed.

Man has suddenly become the superman. Like the giants of the ancient
fable, he has stormed the very ramparts of Divine power, or, like
Prometheus, he has stolen fire of omnipotent forces from Heaven itself
for his use. His voice can now reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and, taking wing in his aeroplane, he can fly in one swift flight from
Nova Scotia to England, or he can leave Lausanne and, resting upon the
icy summit of Mont Blanc--thus, like "the herald, Mercury, new-lighted
on a heaven-kissing hill"--he can again plunge into the void, and thus
outfly the eagles themselves.

In thus acquiring from the forces of Nature almost illimitable power, he
has minimized the necessity for his own physical exertion or even
mental skill. The machine now not only acts for him, but too often
_thinks_ for him.

Is it surprising that so portentous a change should have fevered his
brain and disturbed his mental equilibrium? A new ideal, which he
proudly called "progress," obsessed him, the ideal of quantity and not
quality. His practical religion became that of acceleration and
facilitation--to do things more quickly and easily--and thus to minimize
exertion became his great objective. Less and less he relied upon the
initiative of his own brain and muscle, and more and more he put his
faith in the power of machinery to relieve him of labour. The evil of
our age is that its values are all false. It overrates speed, it
underrates sureness; it overrates the new, it underrates the old; it
overrates automatic efficiency, it underrates individual craftsmanship;
it overrates rights, it underrates duties; it overrates political
institutions, it underrates individual responsibility. We glory in the
fact that we can talk a thousand miles, but we ignore the greater
question, whether when we thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth
saying. We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our
media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music
and