And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides. I will not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical men. Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine--whether it is a machine called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation--is, _Is he tired?_ I have cast my lot once for all--and as it seems to me, too, the lot of the world--with those men who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in their imaginations, great men--men who are not driven to being self-centred or driven to being class-centred, who can be world-centred and inspired. * * * * * When one has made this decision, that one will work for a world in control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought face to face with a fact in our machine civilization which probably is quite new, and which the spirit of man has never had to face in any age before. For the first time in the history of the world, machinery has made it possible for the world to get into the hands of the weak. The Gun began it--the gun in a coward's hands may side with the weak, and the machine in the hands of the weak may temporarily give the world a list or a trend, and leave it leaning on the wrong side. The Trust, for instance, which is really an extremely valuable invention, and perhaps, on the whole, the most important machine of modern times when it is used to defend the rights of the people, is a very different thing when it is pointed at them. We have to-day, not unnaturally, the spectacle of perhaps nine people out of ten getting up and saying in chorus all through the world that Trusts ought to be abolished; and yet it cannot honestly be said that there is really anything about the trust-machine--any more than any other machine--that is inherently wicked, or mechanical and heartless. Our real objection to the trust-machines is not to the machines themselves, but to the fact that they are, or happen to be (judging each Trust by itself), in the hands of the weak and of the tired--of men, that is, who have no spirit, no imagination about people; mechanical-minded men, who, at least in the past, have taken the easiest and laziest course in business--that of making all the money they can.