achine shop of a globe,
turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a
life, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask him
what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He
looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of
Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to
the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past
him night and day,--miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked
into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it
in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes
around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full
of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being.

He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men," says Political
Economy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the
other of three great classes of activity--production, consumption or
distribution."

The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of
association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one
place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of
human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities.

The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of
association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few
peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.

The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of
association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as
consumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be
stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be
loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the
coal up, have been produced by one set of machines to be consumed by
another set of machines.

So omnipresent and masterful and intimate with all existence have cogs
and wheels and belts become, that not a civilized man could be found
on the globe to-day, who, if all the machines that have helped him to
live this single year of 1906 could be gathered or piled around him
where he stands, would be able, for the machines piled high around his
life, to see the sky--to be sure there was a sky. It is then his
privilege, looking up at this horizon of steel and iron and running
belts, to read in a paper book the literary definition of what this
heaven is