The appalling and wanton sacrifice of life which are incident to the evolution of machinery and the division of labor seem to demand at times their elimination. In weariness we are urged to retrace our steps and go back to craftsmanship and the Guilds. But it is idle to talk about going back or eliminating institutionalized features of society. We cannot go back, we have not the ability to discard this or that part of our environment except as we make it over. The result of this making over might be vitalized by methods which had belonged to earlier periods, but neither the methods nor the periods, we can safely say, will live again. Neither our own nor future generations will escape the influence of modern technology. It will play its part. It may be a part which will lead away from some of the destructive influences which developed in the era of craftsmanship and which dominate the present. But a society too enfeebled to use its own experience will not have the power to use the experience of another people or of another time. It is beside the point to look to some other experience or scheme of life and choose that because it seems good, unless the choice is based on a people's present fitness to adapt that other experience or other scheme of life to their own experience. The proposition to revert to an earlier period suggests nothing more than the repetition of an experience out of which the present state of affairs has evolved. Nor is there ground for the hope that in time institutions and relationships will be regulated on principles of altruism. It is not apparent indeed that such regulations would yield even the present allowance of happiness incident to our own immature method of capturing what wealth we can without relation to social factors. As unfortunate as we are in pursuit of that blind method, it is safe to predict that the world would be a madder place than it is to-day if every one devoted himself to doing what he believed was for the good of everybody else.