Instead of saving labour the machine has multiplied it. True, the hours of industrial labour are fewer than they were, e.g. now eight where they were ten and twelve a day; but this is merely to compare worse with better where better is, and that is not everywhere. For a proper contrast compare the industrial with the idyllic task. Even eight hours of labour a day continuously performed by the industrial worker represents a much greater sum of annual effort than his ancestor put into the soil. Consider also how the machine, directly or indirectly, has laid new work upon races hitherto naively existing in a state of nature. The riddle is that industrial civilization, having created to its unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever. As toil it is more productive—there is more to consume. Life has been expanded. It is safer. Physically it is inconceivably richer. Was that the goal? What else is gained? You would think that when man had found a way to provide himself with artificial things in unlimited plenty and a way at the same time to spread the food supply evenly over the face of the earth, the gift of universal peace might follow. Never was the peace more frail; and this, as we shall see—the frailty of the peace—is also a product of the machine. What force is this by fumbling found that man has put in motion? Its pulsations he controls; its consequences so far have controlled him, and modern life has become so involved in a mechanical spiral that we cannot say for certain whether it is that we produce for the sake of consumption or consume for the sake of production. II THE MACHINE AS IF Either the machine has a meaning to life that we have not yet been able to interpret in a rational manner or it is itself a manifestation of life and therefore mysterious. We have seen it grow. We know it to be the exterior reality of our own ideas. Thus we are very familiar with it, as with our arms and legs, and see it in much the same way—that is to say, imperfectly and in some aspects not at all. Certainly it would look very different if for a moment we could see it from an original point of view with the eye of new wonder. Fancy yourself a planetary tourist come visiting here, knowing beforehand neither God nor man, unable therefore to distinguish intuitively between their works. Would you not think the machine that spins silk threads by the ton from cellulose more wonderful than the silkworm similarly converting the mulberry leaf in precious quantities, or a steel ship more amazing than a whale? What of the mechanical beast with a colorless fluid in its tail and a flame in its nose that runs sixty miles an hour without weariness? Would it not seem superior in many ways to the horse that goes forty miles in a day and falls down?