llar and going the wrong way to put things right. Generally
speaking, it must be confessed that he is too fond of rushing off to
the landlord. In his _Travels in Russia_, Theophile Gautier has a
striking word concerning this perilous proclivity. 'Whatever is of
real use to man,' he says, 'was invented from the beginning of the
world, and all the people who have come along since have worn their
brains out to find something new, but have made no improvements.
_Change is far from being progress_; it is not yet proved that steamers
are better than sailing-vessels, or railways than horse traffic. For
my part, I believe that men will end in returning to the old methods,
which are always the best.' I do not agree with the first part of
Gautier's statement. It is not likely. But when he says that we are
getting back to our starting-point, his contention is indisputable. In
the beginning, man was alone with his earth; and all that he did, he
did in the sweat of his brow. Then came the craze for machinery, and
the world became a network of wires and a wilderness of whirling
wheels. But we are beginning to recognize that it has been a
ridiculous mistake. The thing is too clumsy and too complicated. Mr.
Marconi has already taught us to feel half ashamed of the wires. And
Mr. H. G. Wells predicts that in forty years' time all the activities
of a larger and busier world will be driven by invisible currents of
power, and the whole of our industrial machinery will have gone to the
scrap-heap. Man will find himself once more alone with his world, but
it will be a world that has taken him into its confidence and revealed
to him its wonderful secrets. He will look back with a smile on the
age of screaming syrens and snorting engines, of racing pistons and
whirling wheels. He will be amazed at his own earlier readiness to
resort to such a cumbrous and complicated system when a smaller
transition would have ushered him into his kingdom.

The whole drift of our modern scientific development is away from our
clinking mechanical complexities and back towards the great primal
simplicities. We have been too fond of the drastic and dramatic
course, too fond of bouncing off to the landlord. We are too apt to
involve ourselves in a big move when we might have gained our point by
simply trying ducks. We love the things that are burdensome, the ways
that are involved, the paths that lead to headache and heartache. It
is a very anc