Some of my critics have ridiculed my “robust” belief in the reality of progress through invention and the use of machinery. I see no reason to modify my view. A generation ago, Ruskin deplored the spread of railways which scored their lines through “bleeding landscapes.” To me a railway line is a thing of beauty, wherever it may be found. It is a symbol of a higher will and of a purpose transcending the puny sphere of the individual. To see the rails is as if the sinews and muscles of some supernatural being were made visible and accessible to me. And who shall say that I am wrong in that feeling? A railway _is_ an organization superior to man. “Societies,” says Edward Carpenter,[3] “not only of bees (as Maeterlinck has shown), but of all creatures up to man, have, _qua_ societies, a life of their own, inclusive of and superadded to that of their individual members.” And so a railway appears to me as an individual of a higher order, closely organized and endowed with a life of its own. Its mental equipment is its personnel, its directors, clerks, drivers, guards and porters. Its body consists of rails, bridges, tunnels, stations and rolling stock. It has a soul and a living purpose. It has a power of self-maintenance and self-preservation and a rudimentary memory. [3] _The Art of Creation._ I heartily sympathize with the child who adores a locomotive engine. To him, nothing could be more lavishly fraught with beauty. I saw a little while ago a powerful engine at Waterloo Station at the head of an express train for Bournemouth. It was a thing of perfect and satisfying beauty. Its lines suggested calmness and strength and speed. The wisp of steam about its safety valve spoke of well-controlled powers within its massive frame. The driver, a clear-eyed man with trusty hands and sturdy body, was a noble representative of Hephæstus. One felt that the load of health-seeking humanity behind him was in safe hands, that his nerves and muscles would work as perfectly as the engine he regarded with such loving attention, and that the 108 miles of the non-stop journey would be accomplished without a hitch. The beneficent monster lay there in the morning sun, ready to spring forward on its swift trajectory across the “bleeding landscape”! And there are people who can look upon the eager children in the train, armed with their spades and buckets for playing in the health-giving southern sunshine, and deny the progressiveness of the Mechanical Age! They will probably argue, of course, that if it were not for the smoke of the city, due to the “fires of Hephæstus,” there would be no necessity to have trains to carry the children to the seaside. But the smoke of cities is due mainly to incomplete combustion in domestic hearths, and the remedy lies not in the discouragement of mechanical invention but in its further extension until it provides us with a smokeless city.