pend one's life in opening a valve to make a
part of a pin is, as Ruskin pointed out, demoralizing in its
tendencies. The clerk who only operates an adding machine has little
opportunity for self-expression.

Thus, millions of men have lost both the opportunity for real physical
exertion, the incentive to work in the joyous competition of skill, and
finally the reward of work in the sense of achievement.

More serious than this, however, has been the destructive effort of
quantity, the great object of the mechanical age, at the expense of
quality.

Take, for example, the printing-press: No one can question the immense
advantages which have flowed from the increased facility for
transmitting ideas. But may it not be true that the thousandfold
increase in such transmission by the rotary press has also tended to
muddy the current thought of the time? True it is that the
printing-press has piled up great treasures of human knowledge which
make this age the richest in accessible information. I am not speaking
of knowledge, but rather of the current thought of the living
generation.

I gravely question whether it has the same clarity as the brain of the
generation which fashioned the Constitution of the United States. Our
fathers could not talk over the telephone for three thousand miles, but
have we surpassed them in thoughts of enduring value? Washington and
Franklin could not travel sixty miles an hour in a railroad train, or
twice that speed in an aeroplane, but does it follow that they did not
travel to as good purpose as we, who scurry to and fro like the ants in
a disordered ant-heap?

Unquestionably, man of to-day has a thousand ideas suggested to him by
the newspaper and the library where our ancestors had one; but have we
the same spirit of calm inquiry and do we co-ordinate the facts we know
as wisely as our ancestors did?

Athens in the days of Pericles had but thirty thousand people and few
mechanical inventions; but she produced philosophers, poets and artists,
whose work after more than twenty centuries still remain the despair of
the would-be imitators.

Shakespeare had a theatre with the ground as its floor and the sky as
its ceiling; but New York, which has fifty theatres and annually spends
$100,000,000 in the box offices of its varied amusement resorts, has
rarely in two centuries produced a play that has lived.

To-day, man has a cinematographic brain. A thousand images are impressed
daily upon