der committed with a poisoned arrow is different to a murder
committed with a Mauser rifle. All such notions are illusions. Go back
to the first syllable of recorded time, and there you will find your
Christian and your Pagan, your yokel and your poet, helot and hero, Don
Quixote and Sancho, Tamino and Papageno, Newton and bushman unable to
count eleven, all alive and contemporaneous, and all convinced that they
are heirs of all the ages and the privileged recipients of THE
truth (all others damnable heresies), just as you have them to-day,
flourishing in countries each of which is the bravest and best that ever
sprang at Heaven's command from out of the azure main.

Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning
that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle
have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over
Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of
command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains
that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature
to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man
that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul
air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the
cheap cotton costs us. If manufacturing activity means Progress, the
town must be more advanced than the country; and the field laborers and
village artizans of to-day must be much less changed from the servants
of Job than the proletariat of modern London from the proletariat of
Caesar's Rome. Yet the cockney proletarian is so inferior to the village
laborer that it is only by steady recruiting from the country that
London is kept alive. This does not seem as if the change since Job's
time were Progress in the popular sense: quite the reverse. The common
stock of discoveries in physics has accumulated a little: that is all.

One more illustration. Is the Englishman prepared to admit that the
American is his superior as a human being? I ask this question because
the scarcity of labor in America relatively to the demand for it has
led to a development of machinery there, and a consequent "increase
of command over Nature" which makes many of our English methods appear
almost medieval to the up-to-date Chicagoan. This means that the
American has an advantage over the Englishman of exactly the same
nature that the Englishman has over the c