y.
I would count a desperate evil (one to be eradicated if possible by
heroic measure) the first competitive thought that insinuated itself in
the minds of those who come to the Chapel. Yet you and I have suffered
this for years and years in our bringing up; and the millions behind
us--every day, every hour, in every class, they are stimulated by this
baneful energy out of the descent of man. Thus we are still making wars.
The child goes forth established in the immorality of taking what he can
and giving only what he must--against every call, every fragrance, every
flash of light from the new social order and the dream that shall bring
us nearer home as a race.

Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied
things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in
material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the
lie that we prosper by adding _things_ unto ourselves.... A certain
automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within
a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the
maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a
commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means,
the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual
lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of
children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear--to
say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built
nothing.

There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot,
or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others
screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and
pluck it forth--eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have
a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do
again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of
the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages
could pay for these hells of routine.

Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his
individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And
for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a
marvel for efficiency.

The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage
here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down
another for his pur