The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggested to myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation to mechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was a passion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost every man I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster automobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doing so had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kind of shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor of the car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not really belong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a road or through a street and carrying five or six other people with me and, in spite of myself, felt rather grand doing it. Was that because I was in reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writers want great sales for their books because, feeling as I did then the ineffectually of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to be convinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had for a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a sign of growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the world who had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back by becoming ineffectual? Was the Modern after all but the man who had begun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his efforts but at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the ends of his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best but act as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was then thinking in reality what he had meant?” I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of my own thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of New York and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some of the men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of the crafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time of the factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness. Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artists spend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so many of the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of their sexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every year growing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going more and more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life because they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? For two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in two books published at about that time, had declared that industrialism was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.