team-driven machinery as a millpond pours forth its
water; and even in war, the male's ancient and especial field of labour,
a complete reversal of the ancient order has taken place. Time was when
the size and strength of the muscles in a man's legs and arms, and the
strength and size of his body, largely determined his fighting powers,
and an Achilles or a Richard Coeur de Lion, armed only with his spear
or battle-axe, made a host fly before him; today the puniest mannikin
behind a modern Maxim gun may mow down in perfect safety a phalanx of
heroes whose legs and arms and physical powers a Greek god might have
envied, but who, having not the modern machinery of war, fall powerless.
The day of the primary import to humanity of the strength in man's
extensor and flexor muscles, whether in labours of war or of peace, is
gone by for ever; and the day of the all-importance of the culture and
activity of man's brain and nerve has already come.

The brain of one consumptive German chemist, who in his laboratory
compounds a new explosive, has more effect upon the wars of the modern
peoples than ten thousand soldierly legs and arms; and the man who
invents one new labour-saving machine may, through the cerebration of
a few days, have performed the labour it would otherwise have taken
hundreds of thousands of his lusty fellows decades to accomplish.

Year by year, month by month, and almost hour by hour, this change is
increasingly showing itself in the field of the modern labour; and crude
muscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its value
in the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, and
activity, and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimate
forces of nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicate
manipulative skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greater
and greater importance to the race. Already today we tremble on the
verge of a discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when,
through the attainment of a simple and cheap method of controlling
some widely diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, for
instance, as the force of the great tidal wave) there will at once and
for ever pass away even that comparatively small value which still, in
our present stage of material civilisation, clings to the expenditure
of mere crude, mechanical, human energy; and the creature, however
physically powerful, who can merely pull, push, a