Is it surprising that so portentous a change should have fevered his brain and disturbed his mental equilibrium?  A new ideal, which he proudly called “progress,” obsessed him, the ideal of quantity and not quality.  His practical religion became that of acceleration and facilitation—­to do things more quickly and easily—­and thus to minimize exertion became his great objective.  Less and less he relied upon the initiative of his own brain and muscle, and more and more he put his faith in the power of machinery to relieve him of labour.  The evil of our age is that its values are all false.  It overrates speed, it underrates sureness; it overrates the new, it underrates the old; it overrates automatic efficiency, it underrates individual craftsmanship; it overrates rights, it underrates duties; it overrates political institutions, it underrates individual responsibility.  We glory in the fact that we can talk a thousand miles, but we ignore the greater question, whether when we thus out-do Stentor, we have anything worth saying.  We have now made the serene spaces of the upper Heavens our media to transmit market reports and sporting news, second-rate music and worse oratory and in the meantime the great masters of thought, Homer and Shakespeare, Bach and Beethoven remain unbidden on our library shelves.  What a sordid Vanity Fair is our modern Civilization!

This incalculable multiplication of power has intoxicated man.  The lust has obsessed him, without regard to whether it be constructive or destructive.  Quantity, not quality, becomes the great objective.  Man consumes the treasures of the earth faster than he produces them, deforesting its surface and disembowelling its hidden wealth.  As he feverishly multiplied the things he desired, even more feverishly he multiplied his wants.

To gain these, man sought the congested centres of human life.  While the world, as a whole, is not over-populated, the leading countries of civilization were subjected to this tremendous pressure.  Europe, which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, barely numbered 100,000,000 people, suddenly grew nearly five-fold.  Millions left the farms to gather into the cities to exploit their new and seemingly easy conquest over Nature.

In the United States, as recently as 1880, only 15 per cent. of the people were crowded in the cities, 85 per cent. remained upon the farms and still followed that occupation, which, of all occupations, still preserves, in its integrity, the dominance of human labour over the machine.  To-day, 52 per cent. of the population is in the cities, and with many of them existence is both feverish and artificial.  While they have employment, many of them do not themselves work, but spend their lives in watching machines work.

The result has been a minute subdivision of labour that has denied to many workers the true significance and physical benefit of labour.