worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought,
Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library
shelves. What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!

This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man. The lust
has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or
destructive. Quantity, not quality, becomes the great objective. Man
consumes the treasures of the earth faster than he produces them,
deforesting its surface and disembowelling its hidden wealth. As he
feverishly multiplied the things he desired, even more feverishly he
multiplied his wants.

To gain these, man sought the congested centres of human life. While
the world, as a whole, is not over-populated, the leading countries of
civilization were subjected to this tremendous pressure. Europe, which,
at the beginning of the nineteenth century, barely numbered 100,000,000
people, suddenly grew nearly five-fold. Millions left the farms to
gather into the cities to exploit their new and seemingly easy conquest
over Nature.

In the United States, as recently as 1880, only 15 per cent. of the
people were crowded in the cities, 85 per cent. remained upon the farms
and still followed that occupation, which, of all occupations, still
preserves, in its integrity, the dominance of human labour over the
machine. To-day, 52 per cent. of the population is in the cities, and
with many of them existence is both feverish and artificial. While they
have employment, many of them do not themselves work, but spend their
lives in watching machines work.

The result has been a minute subdivision of labour that has denied to
many workers the true significance and physical benefit of labour.

The direct results of this excessive tendency to specialization, whereby
not only the work but the worker becomes divided into mere fragments,
are threefold. Hobson, in his work on John Ruskin, thus classifies them.
In the first place, _narrowness_, due to the confinement to a single
action in which the elements of human skill or strength are largely
eliminated; secondly, _monotony_, in the assimilation of man to a
machine, whereby seemingly the machine dominates man and not man the
machine, and, thirdly, _irrationality_, in that work became dissociated
in the mind of the worker with any complete or satisfying achievement.
The worker does not see the fruit of his travail, and cannot therefore
be truly satisfied. To s