vention, of thought.

We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or
half-dead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such
a thing as tired steel. What people do to steel makes a difference to
it. Steel is sensitive to people. My human spirit grows my arm and moves
it and guides it and expresses itself in it, keeps re-creating it and
destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new
lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more
stolid fashion, responds to my spirit too. Two men changing typewriters
or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots.
Sewing machines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who
use them, and they come to express those particular people and the ways
in which they are different from others. A Titian-haired typewriter girl
makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one.
Typewriters never like to have their people take the liberty of lending
them. Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little
expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have
lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their
wills and made them what they are.

It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover
the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over
his machines. Man, at the present moment, with all his new machines
about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as
self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms
and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh and blood ones. The force
in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created
the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of
glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being
spiritual, and for overflowing everything we touch and everything we use
with our own wills and with the ideals and desires of our souls. The
Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art;
the American has expressed himself in the motor-car; the Englishman has
expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry upon the hills,
and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation. He has made his
walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very treetops express his deep,
silent joy in the earth. So the great, fresh young nations to-day, with