pose to put him into
it, "What are you like?" "What are you especially for?" "What do you
want?" "How can you get it?"

Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns upon a loyal,
patient, imperious attention on our part to what there is inside him,
inside the particular individual man, and how we can get him to let us
know what is inside, get him to decide voluntarily to let us have it,
and let us work it into the common end.

In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which
we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made
machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure
in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of
ourselves.

Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least
dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made
by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and
to reproduce themselves. Man-machines are produced by putting up
possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find
out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life
they will grow up.

Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is
based on the profound and special study of individuals: upon drawing out
the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the passion,
if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing,
self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him.

Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all employers
alike. Employers have very largely overlooked it.

It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine
civilization. We need not be discouraged about machines, because the
secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed.

The elephants are running around in the garden. But they have merely
taken us by surprise. It is their first and their last chance. The men
about us are seeing what to do. We are to get control of the elephants,
first, by getting control of ourselves. We are beginning to organize our
people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in
them can keep on being people, and being better ones. And as our
people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron
machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and help. As we
look about us we shall see our iron machines at l