The brain to make and to use a complex machine is the brain to make and to use a complex social order; and in that growing social order lies our line of duty as a human race. In the inexorable working of our own machines we learn law newly; as in our works of art we learn beauty newly. Kipling has treated of this in “MacAndrews’ Hymn.” The relation of our complex mechanical products with our minds and hearts is as clear as the relation between any animal’s spirit and body. The increasing pleasure is as clear as the increasing use. “Man loves power.” Of course. He loves to transmit energy, to feel it pouring through. He loves it well in his own physical exertions: to swim is a pleasure, to row alone is a pleasure, but to row in a racing eight is a greater pleasure. To sail a catboat is a pleasure, to command the flagship a greater pleasure. The captain loves his ship, and loves to work her, to feel the complex mechanism move in answer to his thought and will, and the prompt co-ordination of all the men whose combined efforts move the great machine. And the kind of man who can be a good captain or a good sailor is a higher social constituent than a South Sea Islander, though the latter could outswim him. Our general feeling of condemnation for machinery is a kind of social asceticism, a reaction from our misuse of the social body, just as the personal asceticism of earlier times was a reaction against misuse of the personal body. In our blind ignorance of the real social life and its laws, in our persistent maintenance of a rudimentary egoism, we have claimed private ownership in these exquisitely social products, and have striven to restrict their mighty multiplication of wealth to private consumption. Such sublime treason has roused instinctive reaction in the public consciousness, and we blindly include the machine in our hatred of its vile abuse, as did the early Christian in his condemnation of the body. Partly owing to this, and partly owing to our cruel form of specialisation, we associate evil with machinery, and, with our usual helpless reversionary tendency, look back fondly to the time when each man or woman worked alone “by hand.” These theorists should be set down in some wilderness for a while with only their hands to help them, as a lesson in social chronology. The hand is at its best in the early Palæolithic period, or even back of that, when it could do duty as a foot on occasion. As the hand made and mastered the tool, society has grown. As the tool became the machine, society has grown better. In the vast machine, moved by tireless natural forces, and guided by the specialised brain and hand, we find the highest expression of nature’s steady tendency to minimise effort and maximise results.