terrible fellows! Have I not lain awake and
listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead
working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on
Space, and on Time while we slept?

My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts--the
crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants--all being driven along by the
little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, "Why don't their
elephants turn around on them and chase them?"

I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.

Our elephants chase us--most of us. Who has not seen locomotives coming
quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people,
chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry
whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great
cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust,
for hundreds of miles around? In the same way I have seen, hundreds of
times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing
them--chasing them fairly out of their lives. And hundreds of thousands
of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen
ordering around people--who pay them for it--in any city of our modern
world.

Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a
gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.

There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any
civilization that would be called great.

First: Do the elephants chase the men in it? Second: And if--as in our
Western civilization--the men have made their own elephants, why should
they be chased by them?

There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative
inferiority of organ music. We have come to the conclusion that perhaps
organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by
organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who
have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with
all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones
that organs can do best--the music that machines like.

Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a
machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the
mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of brass horns, wooden
flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins.
He made violins sing him.

Perha