In place of the free workman, joyously expressing with his own hands the dream of his own mind, came the factory-hand, blindly bitter from the machine-standardisation which thwarted the self-expression which even the farmer enjoyed. In the town of Bidwell, Jim Gibson exults in selling machine-made harnesses and ruining Joe Wainsworth, the old harness maker. Finally, in a fit of rage Wainsworth kills his tormentor. Clara, the wife of Hugh McVey, points the moral: “In her mind the harness maker had come to stand for all the men and women who were in secret revolt against the absorption of the age in machines and the products of machines. He had stood as a protesting figure against what her father had become and what she thought her husband had become.... As a child she had gone often to Wainsworth’s shop with her father or some farm hand, and she now remembered sharply the peace and quiet of the place.... Everything worth while is very far away.... The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.” And we have Anderson’s summary indictment of industrialism: “Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them. They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.” Thus those who have sought an American paradise of nature, a physical paradise, have reported finding only despair. In essentials this hope is identical with the primitivistic and industrial hope which Europe found inadequate over a century ago. Wordsworth, the high priest of naturalism, confessed he had “too blindly reposed” his trust, and he had the wisdom to seek the support of the classical and the Christian traditions. And Ruskin and Carlyle exposed the criminal fallacies involved in setting material gain above the sanctity of the individual personality. But when this outworn, exploded philosophy, based upon primitivism, faith in natural goodness, absolute liberty, _laissez faire_, and reliance upon nature and material things, was transplanted to the vast material resources of a frontier land, it was given a new, hysterical lease of life. Now, a century and a quarter later, a disenchanted America agrees with the English naturalist who testified of his infinite “dejection” and his conviction that man “may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.” III