But suppose the development of labour-saving machinery should reach a stage where all human labour was eliminated, what would be the effect on man?  The answer is contained in an experiment which Sir John Lubbock made with a tribe of ants.  Originally the most voracious and militant of their species, yet when denied the opportunity for exercise and freed from the necessity of foraging for their food, in three generations they became anaemic and perished.

Take from man the opportunity of work and the sense of pride in achievement and you have taken from him the very life of his existence.  Robert Burns could sing as he drove his ploughshare through the fields of Ayr.  To-day millions who simply watch an automatic infallible machine, which requires neither strength nor skill, do not sing at their work but too many curse the fate, which has chained them, like Ixion, to a soulless machine.

The evil is even greater.

The specialization of our modern mechanical civilization has caused a submergence of the individual into the group or class.  Man is fast ceasing to be the unit of human society.  Self-governing groups are becoming the new units.  This is true of all classes of men, the employer as well as the employee.  The true justification for the American anti-monopoly statutes, including the Sherman anti-trust law, lies not so much in the realm of economics as in that of morals.  With the submergence of the individual, whether he be capitalist or wage-earner, into a group, there has followed the dissipation of moral responsibility.  A mass morality has been substituted for individual morality, and unfortunately, group morality generally intensifies the vices more than the virtues of man.

Possibly, the greatest result of the mechanical age is this spirit of organization.

Its merits are manifold and do not require statement; but they have blinded us to the demerits of excessive organization.

We are now beginning to see—­slowly, but surely—­that a faculty of organization which, as such, submerged the spirit of individualism, is not an unmixed good.

Indeed, the moral lesson of the tragedy of Germany is the demoralizing influence of organization carried to the nth power.  No nation was ever more highly organized than this modern State.  Physically, intellectually and spiritually it had become a highly developed machine.  Its dominating mechanical spirit so submerged the individual that, in 1914, the paradox was observed of an enlightened nation that was seemingly destitute of a conscience.

What was true of Germany, however, was true—­although in lesser degree—­of all civilized nations.  In all of them, the individual had been submerged in group formations, and the effect upon the character of man has been destructive of his nobler self.

This may explain the paradox of so-called “progress.”  It may be likened to a great wheel, which, from the increasing domination of mechanical forces, developed an ever-accelerating speed, until, by centrifugal action, it went off its bearings in 1914 and caused an unprecedented catastrophe.  As man slowly pulls himself out of that gigantic wreck and recovers consciousness, he begins to realize that speed is not necessarily progress.