Do we really think that speed, standardization, quantity measurements, are worthy human qualities? Is efficiency truly the goal of the good life and has it not been vastly overrated when applied to human beings? This is what a Socrates would ask us and this would be the point of his questions: that men were not made to be well-fitting cogs in machines; that we are not walking accessories or spare parts; that life is greater than the process of securing the means of life, and we must be at least as concerned with its finished splendour as with structure and structural problems; that we cannot always live in an atmosphere of oil and dust; that it may be we are laying the foundations for a civilization of great beauty, but that most of us are rushing up and down ladders, happy in our own feverishness.

This is what a Socrates would tell us. But Socrates is dead, cast off by a generation that did not understand him. What can we do to attest our allegiance to his leadership? Perhaps there is one small act of faith to be performed. Each for himself, we can keep at least a corner of our lives safe from mechanism, some shining citadel to be defended at all costs against the assaults of efficiency, some sunny garden which order and ma

chine-made standards and busy interests have not defiled. Education has failed if it does not teach us how to build, against the world, such a retreat as this, how to maintain, against the pressure of convention, a home of the unsubdued.

The City Council of a town on Long Island recently ordered cut down the hundred-year-old shade trees lining its principal street. The reason given was that "the trees make this promising industrial centre look like a hick village." For those of us who would be guided by the realism and perspective that Socrates would have shown, here is the task: to resist the encroachments of industrialism upon the inner life; to keep alive the shade trees in the human soul.

Chapter V

THE UNITY OF CIVILIZATION

"When the chalking up of a figure in a New York bank can make or mar fortunes in Tokio and Stockholm, is it possible that men should retain their simple feudal loyalties, and their old sense of national divisions?"

-BRAILSFORD.

AN occasional nightmare haunts the sleep of Twentieth Century man. Wide eyed and frightened he stares through the dark. He dreams that his machines have stopped. Nothing more deadly could happen to him. His very existence is predicated upon their continuous operation. Their pulsations have become an indispensable part of the structure of his life. In a single century they have become his means of survival. They are here to stay, or else to perish with him. As a flesh

eating creature cannot return to the conditions of its remote ancestors and subsist upon a diet of herbs, so Twentieth Century man cannot return even to the days of his grandfathers and live without his machines. Consequently, he guards them with anxious care, and his dreams are disturbed by a vague fear that something will happen to them.

But what could happen to them? Why should they stop? What is to interfere with their continuous operation? If the life of man is dependent upon the regulated revolution of machine wheels, why is it not reasonable to suppose that the wheels will continue to revolve? Is there indication of any loss of intelligence on the part of man, or are there difficulties in the way which have not existed for a century or more?

That difficulties are increasing in the path of our machine civilization is probably true. Its very compactness is its greatest weakness. It is fast developing a unity, a solidarity, an organic body. The cells that compose it are no longer independent. They have been woven together like the cells of the human body, each highly specialized, each performing its own function, each essential to the health and life of the whole. Thus, if one group of cells be damaged, the whole body of cells is

damaged, and this whole body can be killed by a single vital wound.

This is what is happening to our machine civilization. It is bringing a new economic synthesis into the world, a new principle of integration. It has developed a high degree of specialization as between different factories, different areas of the same country, and even different nations, each unit contributing to the whole; and the total products of this joint labour are the consumable commodities upon which modern life is based. But the units have lost their independence. Each factory, each area, each nation, is part of a vast living body. The cells have united in an organism in which lack of harmony, or the disease or disuse of any of its members, may imperil not only the health of the other members but the health of the whole. More and more each year our civilization exemplifies the law that the greater the complexity of an organization, the greater also its susceptibility to fatal hurt. As its energies increase, it develops within itself a deeper, a keener, a more exquisitely ramified sensibility to every shock or wound.

It is this process of cellular conjugation, this fast-growing element of interdependence, that distinguishes our new world life. No longer are