d spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about
machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them
as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney
first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great
cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted
nations, and began making for us--all around us, before our eyes, as
though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty, helpless
little religions--the hell we had ceased to believe in.

The hell is here, and is going to be here apparently as long as may be
necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more. If a hell on our
own premises, shut down hard over our lives here and now, is what is
necessary to make us religious and human once more, if we are reduced to
it, and if having a hard, literal hell--one of our own--is our only way
of seeing things, of fighting our way through to the truth, and of
getting once more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I
for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to hurry us
along and soon have it over with.

But while, like Ruskin, any one can look about the machines and see
hell, he can see hell to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven lined up close
beside it. The machines have come to have souls. The machines we can see
all about us have taken sides. We can all of us see the machines about
us to-day like vast looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the
world, the fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little
children, and the very fate of God; and everything about us we can see
turning at last on what we are doing with the machines that are about
us, and what we are letting our machines do with us.

* * * * *

It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side by side with
machines better from day to day, to consider what these two souls or
spirits in the machines are, and what they are doing and likely to do.
If one knows them and one sees them, and sees how they are working, it
is easier to take sides and join in and help.

It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery--the spirit
of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and
there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains,
conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one's work
over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult,