These ideas were the subject of long and lively discussions between my wife, her father, and myself. These discussions, as was natural with discussions arising out of a doctrine which was maturing in the mind of a patient seeker after truth, were, so to speak, eccentric; they revolved now round one point, now round another. Nevertheless, the central point round which they ultimately revolved was this: whether the wealth for which man has to thank machinery is real or apparent. I said that, since machinery produces much and at great speed, there seemed to me no room for doubt that it increased the sum of benefits at man’s disposal, and therefore enriched the world. My wife replied that if machinery produces much, it also consumes enormously, more indeed than it produces, so that a mechanical civilisation must always feel itself tormented by the necessity of having more than it possesses, and, therefore, must be always in a state of indigence. So the discussions went on, lively and long, without either of the parties convincing the other; and at last I came to the conclusion that our _amour propre_ must be making us persist in the sophistical discussion of an unreal question. When I got to America, however, I saw that the question we were discussing was anything but unreal; for it was these ideas and discussions which enabled me to collate our friend’s economic difficulties with the mystical spirit which pervades so large a part of American life, and to understand the nature of American progress. Were not the economic difficulties encountered especially in the big cities, notwithstanding the immense wealth of the country, by the most numerous classes of America, the decisive proof that really, as my wife asserted, the wealth created by a mechanical civilisation is to some extent only apparent? That notwithstanding the great depredation of nature carried out with means furnished by science, men’s needs increase faster than their riches; therefore that mechanical civilisation revolves in the vicious circle of an insoluble contradiction? All the same, if America had set herself with less eagerness to exploit by means of machinery her immense natural resources; if she had not welcomed so many millions of men from all parts of the world; if she had not invested in machinery and industries and railways such a vast amount of capital, without a doubt we should find a smaller number of people living, and living more comfortably, in America to-day; but the conquest of the vast continent would not have reached its present pitch, and the world would not have witnessed that unparalleled event in its history, the bewildering development of the United States.