oetry in them or not. It is a mere abstract question to the machines.

It is not an abstract question to the people who are under the
machines. Men who are under things want to know what the things are
for, and they want to know what they are under them for. It is a very
live, concrete, practical question whether there is, or can be, poetry
in machinery or not. The fate of society turns upon it.

There seems to be nothing that men can care for, whether in this world
or the next, or that they can do, or have, or hope to have, which is
not bound up, in our modern age, with machinery. With the fate of
machinery it stands or falls. Modern religion is a machine. If the
characteristic vital power and spirit of the modern age is
organization, and it cannot organize in its religion, there is little
to be hoped for in religion. Modern education is a machine. If the
principle of machinery is a wrong and inherently uninspired
principle--if because a machine is a machine no great meaning can be
expressed by it, and no great result accomplished by it--there is
little to be hoped for in modern education.

Modern government is a machine. The more modern a government is, the
more the machine in it is emphasized. Modern trade is a machine. It is
made up of (1) corporations--huge machines employing machines, and (2)
of trusts--huge machines that control machines that employ machines.
Modern charity is a machine for getting people to help each other.
Modern society is a machine for getting them to enjoy each other.
Modern literature is a machine for supplying ideas. Modern journalism
is a machine for distributing them; and modern art is a machine for
supplying the few, very few, things that are left that other machines
cannot supply.

Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable
thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better
or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes
little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It
has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for.
We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We
are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We
breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more
than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes,
even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in
machinery--that is if there is no b