The Voice of the Machines | Page 2

more beautiful to men than the telegraph stopping
the sun in the midst of its high heaven, and holding it there, while the
will of a child to another child ticks round the earth. "Time shall be
folded up as a scroll," saith the voice of Man, my Brother. "The spaces
between the hills, to ME," saith the Voice, "shall be as though they
were not."
The voice of man, my brother, is a new voice.
It is the voice of the machines.

II
AS SEEN THROUGH A HATCHWAY
In its present importance as a factor in life and a modifier of its
conditions, the machine is in every sense a new and unprecedented fact.
The machine has no traditions. The only way to take a traditional stand
with regard to life or the representation of life to-day, is to leave the
machine out. It has always been left out. Leaving it out has made little
difference. Only a small portion of the people of the world have had to
be left out with it.
Not to see poetry in the machinery of this present age, is not to see
poetry in the life of the age. It is not to believe in the age.
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.

The number of persons who are engaged in consumption outside of
association with machinery is equally insignificant. So far as
consumption is concerned, any passing freight train, if it could be
stopped and examined on its way to New York, would be found to be
loaded with commodities, the most important part of which, from the
coal up, have been produced by