dual man who creates the
machine--the inventor, and (2) the man who lives with the machine the
engineer.

3. It expresses God, if only that He is a God who can make men who can
thus express their souls. Machinery is an act of worship in the least
sense if not in the greatest. If a man who can make machines like this
is not clever enough with all his powers to find a God, and to worship
a God, he can worship himself. It is because the poetry of machinery
is the kind of poetry that does immeasurable things instead of
immeasurably singing about them that it has been quite generally taken
for granted that it is not poetry at all. The world has learned more
of the purely poetic idea of freedom from a few dumb, prosaic machines
that have not been able to say anything beautiful about it than from
the poets of twenty centuries. The machine frees a hundred thousand
men and smokes. The poet writes a thousand lines on freedom and has
his bust in Westminster Abbey. The blacks in America were freed by
Abraham Lincoln and the cotton gin. The real argument for unity--the
argument against secession--was the locomotive. No one can fight the
locomotive very long. It makes the world over into one world whether
it wants to be one world or not. China is being conquered by
steamships. It cannot be said that the idea of unity is a new one.
Seers and poets have made poetry out of it for two thousand years.
Machinery is making the poetry mean something. Every new invention in
matter that comes to us is a spiritual masterpiece. It is crowded with
ideas. The Bessemer process has more political philosophy in it than
was ever dreamed of in Shelley's poetry, and it would not be hard to
show that the invention of the sewing machine was one of the most
literary and artistic as well as one of the most religious events of
the nineteenth century. The loom is the most beautiful thought that
any one has ever had about Woman, and the printing press is more
wonderful than anything that has ever been said on it.

"This is all very true," interrupts the Logical Person, "about
printing presses and looms and everything else--one could go on
forever--but it does not prove anything. It may be true that the loom
has made twenty readers for Robert Browning's poetry where Browning
would have made but one, but it does not follow that because the loom
has freed women for beauty that the loom is beautiful, or that it is a
fit theme for poetry." "Besides"--breaks in th