r by people who are morbidly
unmechanical, on the other.

People in a machine civilization who try to live without being automatic
and mechanical-minded part of the time and in some things, people who
try to make everything they do artistic and self-expressive and
hand-made, who attend to all their own thoughts and finish off all their
actions by hand themselves, soon wish they were dead.

People who do everything they do mechanically, or by machinery, are dead
already.

It is bad enough for those of us who are trying to live our lives
ourselves--real, true, hand-made individual lives--to have to fight all
these machines about us trying daily to roar and roll us down into
humdrum and nothingness, without having to fight besides all these dear
people we have about us too, who have turned machines, even one's own
flesh and blood. Does not one see them--see them everywhere--one's own
flesh and blood, going about like stone-crushers, road-rollers, lifts,
lawn-mowers?

Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical
people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.

There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right
time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right
time and right place. And there must be some way in which men can be
mechanical and unmechanical at will.

The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of
machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their
souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like
radium and railroads, and who know when and when not and how and how not
to use them who are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully,
that they do not let the machines outwit them and unman them.

Who are these men?

How do they do it?

They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines,
who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make
people-machines and iron machines run softly together.

CHAPTER VII

THE MEN'S MACHINES

There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods
stores could be human. They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls
of the people who owned them.

When machinery was invented and when organization was invented--machines
of people--drygoods stores became vast selling machines.

We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five
hundred clerks in it as human as a