It would be so easy, this business of making over the world, if it were only a matter of creating machinery. There has probably never been lacking the sort of energy and talent that is needed for this sort of work; and at any rate, during the last three centuries, with the growth of technology, the mechanical services at the command of our engineers and organizers are huge and adequate. Unfortunately, we are still in the same ditch that Carlyle mordantly pointed out in his essay on Characteristics: Given a world of knaves, we are trying by various cunning devices to produce an honesty from their united action. I do not share Carlyle’s contempt for human nature in the raw, but he is quite right, I believe, in making fun of the superficiality of our partisan utopias. These utopias were so concerned to alter the shell of the community’s institutions that they neglected to pay attention to the habits of the creature itself--or its habitat. That is why mechanical devices play such an important part, perhaps, in all these utopias, from Jeremy Bentham, with his Panopticon method of reforming criminals, down to the hideous cog-and-wheel utopia of Edward Bellamy. The conceptions of human life that our reforming groups have had have been pretty thin and unsatisfying. Any adequate conception of a new social order would, it seems to me, include the scenery, the actors, and the play. It is a mark of our immaturity that we never seem able to get beyond the scene shifting. Our social theorists, in so far as they consider the actors at all, are inclined to treat them as mechanical puppets. As for the play itself--the universal drama of courtship and trial and adventure and contest and achievement, in which every human being is potentially the hero or heroine--the play itself has hardly entered into their consciousness. Their values have not been human values: they have been such values as have been authenticated by commerce and industry, values such as efficiency, fair wages, and what not. These, at any rate, have been the immediate objects of effort, and if human values hung vaguely in the background, they were to be realized in a distant and unascertainable future. So one often feels that no matter how base and deteriorated the modern community is, it nevertheless retains in its totality a greater measure of human values than many of the groups that have attacked its inadequacy have to offer.