Beyond even that, we construct the complex implements of further construction, and make machines. Man’s first step up was in the detachable tool, though but a stick or stone. From the hand-thrown stone to the far-flung lyddite shell is a clear line of mechanical evolution, in which each thing made held the thought which made it and suggested further possibility. From the twirling spindle to the many-loomed mill; from the stylus to the press,—this is familiar ground in fact, but all untrodden in its rich significance. Nowhere have we more misused, misunderstood, and blasphemed the laws of human life than in our attitude toward machinery. Measured by any standard you will, as low as that of individual physical comfort, as high as that of the widest social service, human progress, lying in the same line as all evolution, involves the constant adaptation of means to ends with conservation of energy. Most energy is spent with smallest result at the level where the mole digs, each for himself, with his tools growing on him. The spade is higher than the claw, and the modern earth-devouring excavator is higher than the spade. Some digging is necessary for the maintenance of our physical lives. The more human energy we spend in digging the less remains for further development. To dig is not our purpose here, but to grow. Therefore social evolution quietly relegates digging to the lower automatic functions, making the mechanical organs by which the most digging can be done by the least men, that more and more of us may leave the level of the mole. Of all things made, the things we make things with are most vitally and distinctively human. Something of the truth of this may be seen in the larger and deeper pleasure given by the use of the higher tool, and, even more clearly, in the higher kind of man developed by the higher tool. The digger with the attached claws is but a mole. The digger with the detachable spade is but an “unskilled labourer,” and even the maker of that spade but a simple smith. The digger with the great excavator is an engineer, and its maker a skilled machinist and inventor. The ox-driver is not to be compared with the engine-driver or the bargeman with the admiral. Now the mole, or the unskilled labourer, may be as “happy,” as an individual, as the skilled machinist. But the measure of their value is in this. The mole is incapable of further combinations. The unskilled labourer is capable only of a low order of combinations. The more specialised brain of the inventor is capable of higher combinations. Of such as he a democracy can be built; he is raised far along the line of social evolution. The childish, primitive pride in a “hand-made” individual product is most ignoble compared to the modern pride in a common product through complex means.