Modern life goes by clockwork. So much so that no modern household can dispense with a mechanical timepiece; which may be more or less accurate, it is true, but which commonly marks the passage of time with a degree of exactness that would have seemed divertingly supererogatory to the common man of the high tide of handicraft.[141] Latterly the time so indicated, it should be called to mind, is “standard time,” standardised to coincide over wide areas and to vary only by large and standard units. It brings the routine of life to a nicely uniform schedule of hours throughout a population which exceeds by many fold the size of those communities that once got along contentedly enough without such an expedient under the régime of handicraft. In this matter the demands of the machine have even brought on a revision of the time schedule imposed by the mechanism of the heavenly bodies, so that not only “solar time,” but even the “mean solar time” that once was considered to be a sufficient improvement on the ways of Nature, has been superseded by the schedule imposed by the railway system. The discipline of the timepiece is sufficiently characteristic of the discipline exercised by the machine process at large in modern life, and as a cultural factor, as a factor in shaping the habits of thought of the modern peoples, it is itself moreover a fact of the first importance. Of the standardisation of the time schedule just spoken of, the earlier, the adoption of “mean solar time,” was due immediately to the exigencies of the machine process as such, which would not tolerate the seasonal fluctuations of “apparent” solar time. This epithet “apparent,” by the way, carries a suggestion that the time schedule so designated is less true to the actualities of the case than the one which superseded it. And so it is if the actualities to which regard is had are those of the machine process; whereas the contrary is true if the actualities that are to decide are those of the seasons, as they were under the earlier dispensation. “Standard time” has gone into effect primarily through the necessities of railway communication,--itself a dominant item in the mechanical routine of life; but it is only in a less degree a requirement of the other activities that go to make up the traffic of modern life. The railway is one of the larger mechanical contrivances of the machine age, and its exigencies in this respect are typical of what holds true at large. Communication of whatever kind, as well as the supply of other necessaries, is standardised in terms of time, space, quantity, frequency, and indeed in all measurable dimensions; and the “consumer,” as the denizens of these machine-made communities are called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in his demand and uses of them, on pain of “getting left.” To “get left” is a colloquialism of the machine era and describes the commonest form of privation under the régime of the machine process.