Part 3
Some of my critics have ridiculed my “robust” belief in the reality of progress through invention and the use of machinery. I see no reason to modify my view. A generation ago, Ruskin deplored the spread of railways which scored their lines through “bleeding landscapes.” To me a railway line is a thing of beauty, wherever it may be found. It is a symbol of a higher will and of a purpose transcending the puny sphere of the individual. To see the rails is as if the sinews and muscles of some supernatural being were made visible and accessible to me. And who shall say that I am wrong in that feeling? A railway _is_ an organization superior to man. “Societies,” says Edward Carpenter,[3] “not only of bees (as Maeterlinck has shown), but of all creatures up to man, have, _qua_ societies, a life of their own, inclusive of and superadded to that of their individual members.” And so a railway appears to me as an individual of a higher order, closely organized and endowed with a life of its own. Its mental equipment is its personnel, its directors, clerks, drivers, guards and porters. Its body consists of rails, bridges, tunnels, stations and rolling stock. It has a soul and a living purpose. It has a power of self-maintenance and self-preservation and a rudimentary memory.
[3] _The Art of Creation._
I heartily sympathize with the child who adores a locomotive engine. To him, nothing could be more lavishly fraught with beauty. I saw a little while ago a powerful engine at Waterloo Station at the head of an express train for Bournemouth. It was a thing of perfect and satisfying beauty. Its lines suggested calmness and strength and speed. The wisp of steam about its safety valve spoke of well-controlled powers within its massive frame. The driver, a clear-eyed man with trusty hands and sturdy body, was a noble representative of Hephæstus. One felt that the load of health-seeking humanity behind him was in safe hands, that his nerves and muscles would work as perfectly as the engine he regarded with such loving attention, and that the 108 miles of the non-stop journey would be accomplished without a hitch. The beneficent monster lay there in the morning sun, ready to spring forward on its swift trajectory across the “bleeding landscape”! And there are people who can look upon the eager children in the train, armed with their spades and buckets for playing in the health-giving southern sunshine, and deny the progressiveness of the Mechanical Age!
They will probably argue, of course, that if it were not for the smoke of the city, due to the “fires of Hephæstus,” there would be no necessity to have trains to carry the children to the seaside. But the smoke of cities is due mainly to incomplete combustion in domestic hearths, and the remedy lies not in the discouragement of mechanical invention but in its further extension until it provides us with a smokeless city.
The fires of Hephæstus are fashioning a new world. They are welding humanity into a coherent mass. All the metals, all the ninety chemical elements, are being pressed into service. Whose service? The service of a race whose destiny we can as yet only dimly appreciate. Already we command temperatures varying from a region within a few degrees of the absolute zero to within a few hundred degrees of the heat of the sun. The sight of our eyes has been supplemented to such an extent that we can appreciate and deal with some fifteen octaves of visible and invisible light instead of the single octave “naturally” accessible to our sight. We command pressures of tons per square millimetre and degrees of vacuum down to a hundred-millionth of an atmosphere. We can photograph the track of a single atom tearing its way through moist air. We can print 500,000 copies of a paper of 150,000 words daily and sell it for a penny. We have banished bears and wolves from our home countries and have learnt to wage war against invisible germs of disease. We have acquired the power of bringing beautiful music into the homes of our humblest citizens. The luxuries of our forbears are the common possessions of our own generation. If we are not happier than our ancestors, the fault lies in ourselves, in our ingratitude and lack of imagination. Or must we conclude that happiness is a negligible thing in the great scheme of progress, and that that scheme does not concern itself with our individual feelings?
I for one believe that happiness is on the up-grade, too. Hephæstus is not only a strong and a clever god, but a god with a sense of humour and a very lovable character.
IV
Forerun thy peers, thy time, and let Thy feet, millenniums hence be set In midst of knowledge, dreamt not yet.
The empire of Hephæstus is expanding before our eyes. His bellows blow through our blast furnaces. His anvils ring in thousands of factories. His engines career over the land, and his steamers over the sea. His internal-combustion cars are strung out along the roadways, and his avions run their furrows through the clouds. Wherever he goes, he lightens the burdens of humanity and gladdens all hearts with his gifts. He brings warmth and light into dark places. He draws mankind closer and closer together. He draws them together without diminishing the distance between them. He simply makes that distance impotent to hold them apart. He enables the city children to leave their slums and gather fresh health in the open country. He gives the grimed city worker fresh clear air wherein to sleep. His lorries, thundering along the highways, tighten the bonds between the farmer who gathers the fruit and the town dweller who consumes it.
Nor is Hephæstus satisfied yet. His task is but half finished. The whole earth must be Vulcanized.
The God of Fire and of Iron hobbles over the broad earth, seeking and finding new paths of advancement towards a better and fuller life.
Man has become less and less limited by his permanent organism, that Body which in the beginning was all he possessed. He has now as many different shapes as ever Proteus had, and he can assume any of them at will. At one time he has the shape of a rowing boat, his arms prolonged seven feet or more till his blades skim the water. Again, his legs will be two wheels, and his body will be like those steeds with fire-breathing nostrils which Hephæstus made for the King of Colchis. Again, the pupil of his eye will grow until its diameter measures 100 inches and then he will sound the depths of the heavens with the power of 100,000 eyes in one. When he goes to war, he throws his “stone” some seventy miles and arms it with vast destruction. He belches forth deadly vapours which choke and strangle his enemies. He becomes an armed slug creeping over all obstacles and destroying as he creeps.
In times of peace he dresses in various garbs to suit his changing occupation. His womenfolk emphasize and glorify their variety of personal presentation and expression. Protea shines in all the colours and shades of the rainbow, and invents new colours and new forms every day, forms of dress, of outline, and of her very bodily figure.
The resignations and renunciations of former ages are forgotten. Music, travel, pictures, education――the luxuries of past generations are the common property of all to-day. That is the sort of Communism which is feasible and reasonable. Take all the luxuries and good things of this life and bring them within reach of all by cheapening their cost of production. Travel at a pound a mile is a luxury. Travel at a penny a mile becomes a “necessity” as soon as people get used to it and take it for granted.
Security and seclusion are privileges cherished by what used to be called the “aristocrats.” Place both within reach of the masses by insurance and by transport facilities. Make all these luxuries and privileges common property. It is not so many centuries ago that a mariner’s compass was bartered for diamonds. To-day it costs a penny. And then we come upon a difficulty. When a thing becomes common property, or so cheap as to be of practically no price, it ceases to be coveted. There is a tendency deep-rooted in the human heart to reach out beyond the things of to-day for something not yet attained. When Communism has shared out the earth, it will ask for the moon. Humanity will never assume a “dead level of mediocrity.” There will always be the Thyroid Type, energetic, inquisitive, sensitive, inventive, and restless. The class of Pathfinders will be recruited from that type. The Pituitary Type will furnish commanders and organizers, while the Adrenal Type will furnish the rank and file. But the intermixture of the various types will bring out special constitutions and varieties in unexpected quarters, and it behoves us to keep “_la carrière ouverte aux talents_.”
Thus the human army will march forward, led by a Pillar of Fire. Its pace will be constantly accelerated, but we shall hardly be aware of it, for our methods of measuring time will change in the same ratio. A well-made motor-car on a smooth road can hum along sweetly at sixty miles an hour, and its occupants will be less impressed and excited than they would be by the horse careering at 20 miles per hour! And what are all these speeds to the absolutely smooth planetary speed of nineteen miles per second!
It has been asserted that the tremendous powers conferred upon man by machinery have produced the terrific wars of recent times by placing power in the wrong hands. There may be some justice in this, but the amount of destruction is negligible in comparison with the amount of construction and reparation. When Kitchener saved a few hundred casualties at Paardeberg by sparing his men, he lost 10,000 at Bloemfontein by enteric fever. The bloodiest war is sometimes the least costly on balance. The greatest war of all history ended but seven years ago, and already the beaten nations have healed up their wounds and are looking forward to the future with greater confidence than many of the “victorious” nations. Mankind is increasing the rapidity of its nervous reaction to emergencies and injuries. The leucocytes of the body politic set to work sooner and more effectively to heal the damage. Mankind as an organism is daily improving its circulatory system, _alias_ its transport facilities. Its nervous system closely imitates organic nerves by its cables and land-lines, and it improves upon nature by adding wireless communication and resonance to the organic devices of the body.
Mankind is being moulded into a single compact self-contained body on the anvil of Hephæstus. It is still subject to feverish ailments and some chronic diseases. But the general outlines of future development are clearly discernible. There must be pauses and set-backs. The brilliant scientific and artistic development of classical Hellenism was all but lost in the destruction of the Roman civilization. But the Arabs kept the flickering flame alive until Europe awoke from its torpor and lit its torch once more. Since then there has been no turning back. The age of science, discovery, and invention, the age of mechanism and machinery and power, has come and come to stay. Man, liberated from mechanical drudgery by the machine, has time to develop his intellectual and artistic powers. His necessities being supplied by pressing a button, he is liberated to enjoy a more varied existence. If some men and women are still bound to monotonous tasks, it does not necessarily mean unhappiness, for the Pathfinders’ life is one of constant care and much anxiety. Discovery is 90 per cent. failure, and something like a daily routine of regular and monotonous work sometimes appears in the light of a blissful refuge. Besides, the human heart and organism easily falls into a routine in which daily work is hardly felt, being done without conscious effort. This fact is often forgotten by those who envy the life of the organizer and financier, which is one of much risk and anxiety, relieved by an occasional big prize.
The ideal state of things would be attained if those of an adventurous disposition could be given the adventurous part of human activity, and if those who are plodders by nature could be left to do the plodding.
That is a matter for future development, either consciously fostered by wise leaders of our race, or unconsciously evolved from the depths of wisdom hidden below the threshold of the racial consciousness.
But the goal is in sight. The earth is being organized and unified under the ægis of the human race, the protoplasm of this planet, the race which, transcending the mechanism and long-established traditions of its own germ-plasm, enlarged and multiplied its functions until it acquired the use of, fire. Upon that achievement it built an unprecedented form of life, a super-“natural” edifice of infinite power, as yet but dimly realized, but which in its full beauty and perfection will be nothing less than Divine.
THE END.
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.