ardly even a village footway left anywhere to-day where one
cannot see these two worlds, or the spirit of these two worlds, flitting
past one through the streets in people's faces, and nightly before our
eyes, struggling with each other to possess, to swallow away into itself
human souls, to master the fate of man upon the earth.

One of these is the World of the Hand-made; the other is the
Machine-made World.

* * * * *

As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them
flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent
resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I
try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an
account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age
with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself
with a great task before me. And yet one must do it; one cannot live in
an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other
age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up
one's mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live
in it. Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I
begin to try to decide which of the two--the Hand-made World or the
Machine-made World--I will choose. I find that in an odd, confused,
groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both. In spite of all
its ugly ways--a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody,
its magnificent heartlessness--I find I have come to take in the
Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a
terrible and strange beauty there is in it. And then, too, even if I
wanted to give it up, I could not: neither I nor any man, nor all the
world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred
thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a
little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World. There must be some way
out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made. We
have merely lost it for a moment.

Which way shall we turn? And so at last to the little Thing through
which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways
that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to
the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last! I turn to
the Machines Themselves. Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced