it. That is the key to my life--to
make the best of it, but not drearily, with the passiveness of a slave,
but passionately and with desire. Invention is an artifice man employs
to overcome the roundabout. It is the short cut to satisfaction. It
makes man potent, so that he can do more things in a span. I am a worker
and doer. The common origin is not a despair to me; it has a value, and
it strengthens my arm in the work to be done.

The play and interplay of force and matter we call "evolution." The more
man understands force and matter, and the play and interplay, the more
is he enabled to direct the trend of evolution, at least in human
affairs. Here is a great and weltering mass of individuals which we call
society. The problem is: How may it be directed so that the sum of its
happiness greatens? This is my work. I would invent, overcome the
roundabout, seek the short cut. And I consider all matter, all force,
all factors, so that I may invent wisely and justly. And considering
all factors, I consider romance, and I consider you. I weigh your value
in the scheme of things, and your necessity, and I find that you are
both valuable and necessary.

But the history of progress is the history of the elimination of waste.
One boy, running twenty-five machines, turns out a thousand pairs of
socks a day. His granny toiled a thousand days to do the same. Waste has
been eliminated, the roundabout overcome. And so with romance. I strive
not to be blinded by its beauty, but to give it exact appraisal.
Oftentimes it is the roundabout, the wasteful, and must needs be
eliminated. Thus chivalry and its romance vanished before the chemist
and the engineer, before the man who mixed gunpowder and the man who dug
ditches.

I melancholy? Sir, I have not the time--so may I model my answer after
the great Agassiz. I am not a Werther of science, but rather you are a
John Ruskin of these latter days. He wept at the profanation of the
world, at the steam-launches violating the sanctity of the Venetian
canals and the electric cars running beneath the shadow of the pyramids;
and you weep at the violation of like sanctities in the spiritual world.
A gondola is more beautiful, but the steam-launch takes one places, and
an electric car is more comfortable than the hump of a camel. It is too
bad, but waste romance, as waste energy, must be eliminated.

Enough. I shall go on with the argument. I have drawn the line between
pre-nuptial love and