run in the spirit of a hand-made
world?" The particular form in which the question has been put, which is
taken from "Inspired Millionaires" is as follows:

"The idea that there is something in a machine simply as a machine which
makes it inherently unspiritual is based upon the experience of the
world; but it is, after all, a rather amateur and juvenile world with
machines as yet. Its ideas are in their first stages, and are based for
the most part upon the world's experience with second-rate men, working
in second-rate factories--men who have been bullied, and could be
bullied, by the machines they worked with into being machines
themselves. No one would think of denying that men who let machines get
the better of them, either in their minds or their bodies, in any walk
of life, grow unspiritual and mechanical. But it does not take a machine
to make a machine out of a man. Anything will do it if the man will let
it. Even the farmer who is out under the great free dome of heaven, and
working in wonder every day of his life, grows like a clod if he buries
his soul alive in the soil. But farming has been tried many thousands of
years, and the other kind of farmer is known by everybody--the farmer
who is master over the soil; who, instead of becoming an expression of
the soil himself, makes the soil express him. The next thing that is
going to happen is that every one is going to know the other kind of
mechanic. It is cheerfully admitted that the kind of mechanic we largely
have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a
turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be classed as vegetable
life. He is not even organic matter except in a very small part of
himself.

"But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual.
It is the mechanical man beside the machine. A master at a piano (which
is a machine) makes it a spiritual thing; and a master at a
printing-press, like William Morris, makes it a free and artistic and
self-expressive thing."

I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory. I went
past miles of machines--great glass roofs of sunshine over them--and
looked in the faces of thousands of men. As I went through the machines
I kept looking to and fro between the machines and the men who stood
beside them, and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines
and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every machine, I
saw (any one could see it in th