Our elephants chase us—­most of us.  Who has not seen locomotives coming quietly out of their roundhouses in New York and begin chasing people, chasing whole towns, tearing along with them, making everybody hurry whether or no, speeding up and ordering around by the clock great cities, everybody alike, the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust, for hundreds of miles around?  In the same way I have seen, hundreds of times, motor cars turning around on their owners and chasing them—­chasing them fairly out of their lives.  And hundreds of thousands of little wood-and-rubber Things with nickel bells whirring, may be seen ordering around people—­who pay them for it—­in any city of our modern world.

Now and then one comes on a man who keeps a telephone, who is a gentleman with it, and who keeps it in its place, but not often.

There are certain questions to be asked and to be settled in any civilization that would be called great.

First:  Do the elephants chase the men in it?  Second:  And if—­as in our Western civilization—­the men have made their own elephants, why should they be chased by them?

There are some of us who have wondered a little at the comparative inferiority of organ music.  We have come to the conclusion that perhaps organ music is inferior because it has been largely composed by organists, by men who sit at organ machines many hours a day, and who have let their organ machines with all their stops and pedals, and with all their stop-and-pedal-mindedness, select out of their minds the tones that organs can do best—­the music that machines like.

Wagner has come to be recognized as a great and original composer for a machine age because he would not let his imagination be cowed by the mere technical limitations, the narrow-mindedness of brass horns, wooden flutes, and catgut; he made up his mind that he would not sing violins.  He made violins sing him.

Perhaps this is the whole secret of art in a machine civilization.

Perhaps a machine civilization is capable of a greater art than has ever been dreamed in the world before, the moment it stops being chased by its elephants.  The question of letting the crowd be beautiful in our world of machines and crowds to-day turns on our producing Machine-Trainers.

Men possessed by watches in their vest pockets cannot be inspired, men possessed by churches or religion-machines cannot be prophets, men possessed by school-machines cannot be educators.

The reason that we find the poet, or at least the minor poet, discouraged in a machine age probably is, that there is nothing a minor poet can do in it.  Why should nightingales, poppies, and dells expect, in a main trial of strength, to compete with machines?  And why should human beings running for their souls in a race with locomotives expect to keep very long from losing their souls?

The reason that most people are discouraged about machinery to-day is that this is what they think a machine civilization is.  They whine at the machines.  They blame the locomotive.