Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement houses to the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All the young Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall have all the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels out of waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am told by intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all the world before the war standardization had been carried to the highest pitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May it not be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be the nation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age? NOTE VI BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health, into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among whom he worked. There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had point and a flare to them. But in the factories and in army camps! Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature, walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.