All these little anomalies and inconveniences have come with machinery, not of course because the machine is inherently wasteful and fraudulent, but because our social order has not been adapted to its use. Our gains have been canceled, for the reason that the vast expansion of our productive powers has necessitated an equally vast expansion in our consumptive processes. Hence in many departments of building, the advantage of machinery has been almost nullified; and if handicraft has been driven out, it is less because it is inefficient than because the pace of production and consumption under handicraft is so much retarded. When Ruskin began to agitate for the revival of handicraft it looked as if our industrial system were bound to triumph everywhere, and as if Ruskin’s protest were the last weak chirp of romanticism. At the present time, however, the issue is not so simple as it seemed to the builders of the Crystal Palace; nor are the choices so narrow. What seemed a fugitive philosophy when applied to the machine by itself has turned out to be a rigorous and intelligent criticism, when applied to the machine-system. The use of the machine in provinces where it has no essential concern, the network of relationships that have followed the financial exploitation of machinery--these things have led to a revolt, in which the engineers themselves have participated. It is not machinery alone that causes standardization, we begin to see, but the national market; it is not the machine that makes our cheaper houses blank and anonymous, but the absence of any mediating relation between the user and the designer--except through the personality of the builder, who builds for sale.