section of a committee. You cannot even talk
with such a man without selecting some subsection of some subject which
interests him; and if you select any other subsection than his
subsection he will think you a bore; and if you select his subsection he
will think that you do not know anything.

And if you want to get anything done that is different, or that is the
least bit interesting, and want to get some one to do it, how will you
go about it? You will find yourself being sent from one person to
another; and before you know it you find yourself mixed up with nine or
ten subdivisions of nine or ten committees; and after you have got your
nine or ten subsections of nine or ten committees to get together to
consider what it is you want done, they will tell you, after due
deliberation, that it is not worth doing, or that you had better do it
yourself. Then every subsection of every committee will go home
muttering under its breath to every other subsection that a man who
wants slightly different and interesting things done in society is a
public nuisance; and that the man who does not know what subsection he
is in and what subsection of a man he was intended to be, and who tries
to do things, carries dismay and anger on every side around him. Drop
into your pigeonhole and be filed away, O Gentle Reader! Do you think
you are a soul? No; you are Series B. No. 2574, top row on the left.

In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory whose long
windows I often pass in the train, they have their machinery so
perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to make one shoe.

Query--If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four men who do
nothing else to make one shoe, how many machines would it take, and how
many shoes, to make one man?

Query--And when an employer in a shoe factory deals with his employee,
can it really be said, after all, that he is dealing with _him_? He is
dealing with _It_--with Nine Hours a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man.

The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to make a man feel that
he is, and always was, and always will be, immemorially, unanimously,
innumerably nobody.

Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle up over our
oblivion. Not long ago I saw a notice or letter in the _West
Bulletin_--probably from a member of something--ending like this: "...
I hope the readers of the _Bulletin_ will ponder over this suggestion of
_Number_ 29,619.--Sincerely yo