The first fact a man encounters in this modern world, after his mother's face, is the machine. The moment be begins to think outwards, he thinks toward a machine. The bed he lies in was sawed and planed by a machine, or cast in a foundry. The windows he looks out of were built in mills. His knife and fork were made by steam. His food has come through rollers and wheels. The water he drinks is pumped to him by engines. The ice in it was frozen by a factory and the cloth of the clothes he wears was flashed together by looms. The machine does not end here. When he grows to years of discretion and looks about him to choose a place for himself in life, he finds that that place must come to him out of a machine. By the side of a machine of one sort or another, whether it be of steel rods and wheels or of human beings' souls, he must find his place in the great whirling system of the order of mortal lives, and somewhere in the system--that is, the Machine--be the ratchet, drive-wheel, belt, or spindle under infinite space, ordained for him to be from the beginning of the world. The moment he begins to think, a human being finds himself facing a huge, silent, blue-and-gold something called the universe, the main fact of which must be to him that it seems to go without him very well, and that he must drop into the place that comes, whatever it may be, and hold on as he loves his soul, or forever be left behind. He learns before many years that this great machine shop of a globe, turning solemnly its days and nights, where he has wandered for a life, will hardly be inclined to stop--to wait perchance--to ask him what he wants to be, or how this life of his shall get itself said. He looks into the Face of Circumstance. (Sometimes it is the Fist of Circumstance.) The Face of Circumstance is a silent face. It points to the machine. He looks into the faces of his fellow-men, hurrying past him night and day,--miles of streets of them. They, too, have looked into the Face of Circumstance. It pointed to the Machine. They show it in their faces. Some of them show it in their gait. The Machine closes around him, with its vast insistent murmur, million-peopled and full of laughs and cries. He listens to it as to the roar of all Being. He listens to the Machine's prophet. "All men," says Political Economy, "may be roughly divided as attaching themselves to one or the other of three great classes of activity--production, consumption or distribution." The number of persons who are engaged in production outside of association with machinery, if they could be gathered together in one place, would be an exceedingly small and strange and uncanny band of human beings. They would be visited by all the world as curiosities. The number of persons who are engaged in distribution outside of association with machinery is equally insignificant. Except for a few peddlers, distribution is hardly anything else but machinery.