But before I had time to chide Stranahan on this senseless outburst, I was occupied by a new observation. The struggling men were advancing across the stage, and slowly intruding upon the flower beds. But none seemed to notice, and the pandemonium continued until the actors were beating down the flowers on all sides and not a hollyhock or tulip or violet remained. Then suddenly one of the men was thrust out of the wild multitude, and lay on the ground as if dead, his clothes ripped and torn, his body gashed and bleeding. But no one seemed to notice him, and his shrieks and howls rang forth until another had been flung aside with broken limbs, and then another, and then another. In the end only two remained standing, both grappling desperately for a little metallic disk that glittered a deep yellow. With bestial snarls and screeches they wrestled over this trinket; and at length, still wrestling, and with faces blood-red and distorted, they tumbled, moaning, off the stage. After this exhibition there was silence for several minutes. I was glad when at length Agripides seemed to feel that his audience was ready for a change of mood, and again took the center of the stage. “Members of the National Assembly,” he said, “you have now observed modern life in two of its more common phases. You will find something no less familiar in the third phase, which I am about to present to you.” This time a gigantic clattering black machine was rolled on to the stage by some unseen power, its innumerable wheels and belts and chains in rapid motion, some of them moving so swiftly as to look like whirring shadows. But it was not the speed or smoothness of its action that made the mechanism remarkable: all about its side, in a long, even row, stood scores of grime-faced and sooty men, their feet clamped to the ground by iron vises, their arms fastened by long rods to the wheels above. And all the while those rods were moving, moving with rhythmic, clock-like regularity, moving unceasingly up and down, pulling the arms of the men with them, first the right arm and then the left, then again the right and then the left, as though they had done so for all eternity and would continue to do so for all eternity. “The devil take me,” muttered Stranahan, who had to have his way, “It ain’t the men that work the machines! It’s the machines that work the men!”