Professor Veblen, and his like, are prone to use, in writing and speaking, words of many meanings; they unconsciously play upon these words, and so fall into grievous error. For instance, Professor Veblen talks of ours as a “machine” civilization--as if the machine were its new and characteristic factor, determining its form and its destiny. In fact, civilization from its very inception has been “machine-made.” It began when our remotest ancestor snatched the bough of a tree and decided thenceforth to walk erect, using the bough as staff and club--that is, as a machine. Every tool of every kind has been a machine; and the progress of the race has been determined by the number and efficiency of its machines, both those designed to compel peace and those designed to further the arts of peace. If you wish to measure the actual value of any civilization--value in producing healthy minds in healthy bodies--you need only inquire into the kind and number and efficiency of its machines. Why? Because the machine represents the effort of man to adjust himself to his environment, his environment to himself. It gives power to him, whoever he may be, that learns to use it; it leaves him who does not avail himself of its aid, whether through idleness or ignorance or intemperance or incapacity, about where he would have been--certainly no worse off than he would have been--had mankind remained in the helpless, machineless “state of nature.” Evolution has so unevenly affected the human race that, fortunately for us in the foremost files of progress, we need not rely upon history and cautious conjecture for our encouraging and inspiring knowledge of the world of the past, which enables us to see how far and how high we have got, and that the journey is still swiftly, if steeply, upward. There is hardly a stage of human progress that is not now represented on the earth, inviting any man with a passion for the “glorious past,” to disillusionize himself and cheer his pessimism. And we are enabled easily to reconstruct any period of the past. Thus, we have visual confirmation of the truth about Athens which history can only suggest. We know that the Athens of Plato and Praxiteles was no more the true Athens than is the intellect and tradition of Booker Washington a true type of the intelligence and condition of the overwhelming mass of our eight million negroes. We come to understand what Athens’ twenty-five thousand free citizens and many hundred thousand slaves really meant; we penetrate into the profligacy of the Athenian rich, the degradation of the Athenian masses; we realize why Aristides was banished for being just and Alcibiades carried on the shoulders of the Athenian Democracy (!) because he was a degenerate and a debauchee. And so on through all the past.