As a planetary tourist, you may be at least as certain these thoughts are true as men are that they are untrue; and even if they were true that would make no difference really. The problems are practical. We must think of machines as machines act, logically. One difficulty is that whereas the machine is automatically, unerringly logical, and nothing else, man has only a little logic; he has, besides, emotions, sentiments, instincts. In his unlogical character he has often opposed himself to the machine, meaning to destroy it. At the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first railroad in Great Britain and the first in the world, the anti-machine feeling of British craftsmen was dramatically symbolized by a lone weaver seated at a loom on a high hill. England was the industrial machine’s first habitat on earth. There fanatical men led mobs against it. Frail and clumsy as it was at first, its life was indestructible. And now man would not dare destroy it if he could. His own life is bound up with it. Steadily it has grown more powerful, more productive, more ominous. It has powers of reproduction and variation which, if not inherent, are yet as if governed by an active biological principle. Machines produce machines. Besides those from which we get the divisible product of artificial things, there are machines to make machines, and both kinds—(both the machines that make machines and those that transform raw materials into things of use and desire)—obey some law of evolution. Compare any kind of machine you may happen to think of with what its ancestor was only twenty-five years ago. Its efficiency has doubled, trebled; its shape has changed; and, as it is in the animal kingdom so too with machines, suddenly a new species appears, a sport, a freak, with no visible ancestor. Man’s sense of material power within his environment has increased proportionately. It is colossal. Benefits such as formerly he would have thought beyond supernatural agency if he could have imagined them at all he now confers upon himself. More without end presents only technical difficulties. No physical circumstance forbids him. Nevertheless the fact, and only the more strange it is, that for reasons which he names economic or political he seems powerless to inform the augmenting body of machine phenomena with a rational or benign spirit. III THE LAW OF MACHINES No longer do we speak of machines. They are too numerous and too different. We speak of industrial equipment, which means machine-power in general.