As day by day I watch these two worlds with all their people in them flocking past me, I have come to have certain momentary but recurrent resentments and attractions, unaccountable strong emotions; and when I try afterward to rationalize my emotions, as a man should, and give an account of them to myself, and get them ready to use and face my age with, and make myself strong and fit to live in an age, I find myself with a great task before me.  And yet one must do it; one cannot live in an age strongly and fitly if one would rather be living in some other age, or if it is an age with two worlds in it and one cannot make up one’s mind which is the world one wants and settle down quietly and live in it.  Then a strange thing happens, and always happens the moment I begin to try to decide which of the two—­the Hand-made World or the Machine-made World—­I will choose.  I find that in an odd, confused, groping, obstinate way I am bound to choose them both.  In spite of all its ugly ways—­a kind of vast indifference it has to me, to everybody, its magnificent heartlessness—­I find I have come to take in the Machine-made World a kind of boundless, half-secret pride and joy, for a terrible and strange beauty there is in it.  And then, too, even if I wanted to give it up, I could not:  neither I nor any man, nor all the world combined, could unthink to-day a hundred years, fold up a hundred thousand miles of railway, tuck modern life all neatly up again in a little, old, snug, safe, lovable Hand-made World.  There must be some way out, some connecting link between the Hand-made and the Machine-made.  We have merely lost it for a moment.

Which way shall we turn?  And so at last to the little Thing through which the whole world whispers to me on my desk, to the mighty railways that beckon past my door, to the airships that cannot be stilled, and to the rolling mills that will not be silenced, I turn at last!  I turn to the Machines Themselves.  Half-singing and half-cursing, I have faced them.  There is some way in which they can answer and can be made to answer—­can be made to give me and the men about me the kind of world we want.  I try to analyze it and think it out.  What is the thing, the real thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that I cannot and will not give up?  Is not the real thing that is in it something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it, something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a spirit and passed on?  And what is it in the new Machine-made World which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this contradictory obstinate dread of them?  After a time I have made a little cleared space in my mind, a little breathing room.  It has come to me from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight,