We already speak of live and dead iron, of live and dead engines or half-dead and half-sick engines, and we have learned that there is such a thing as tired steel.  What people do to steel makes a difference to it.  Steel is sensitive to people.  My human spirit grows my arm and moves it and guides it and expresses itself in it, keeps re-creating it and destroying it; and daily my soul keeps rubbing out and writing in new lines upon my face; and in the same way my typewriter, in a slow, more stolid fashion, responds to my spirit too.  Two men changing typewriters or motor-cars are, though more subtly, like two men changing boots.  Sewing machines, pianos, and fiddles grow intimate with the people who use them, and they come to express those particular people and the ways in which they are different from others.  A Titian-haired typewriter girl makes her machine move differently every day from a blue-eyed one.  Typewriters never like to have their people take the liberty of lending them.  Steel bars and wooden levers all have little mannerisms, little expressions, small souls of their own, habits of people that they have lived with, which have grasped the little wood and iron levers of their wills and made them what they are.

It is somewhere in the region of this fact that we are going to discover the great determining secret of modern life, of the mastery of man over his machines.  Man, at the present moment, with all his new machines about him, is engaged in becoming as self-controlled, as self-expressive, with his new machines, with his wireless telegraph arms and his railway legs, as he is with his flesh and blood ones.  The force in man that is doing this is the spiritual genius in him that created the machine, the genius of imperious and implacable self-expression, of glorious self-assertion in matter, the genius for being human, for being spiritual, and for overflowing everything we touch and everything we use with our own wills and with the ideals and desires of our souls.  The Dutchman has expressed himself in Dutch architecture and in Dutch art; the American has expressed himself in the motor-car; the Englishman has expressed himself, has carved his will and his poetry upon the hills, and made his landscape a masterpiece by a great nation.  He has made his walls and winding roads, his rivers, his very treetops express his deep, silent joy in the earth.  So the great, fresh young nations to-day, with a kind of new, stern gladness, implacableness, and hope, have appointed to their souls expression through machinery.  Our Engines and our radium shall cry to God!  Our wheels sing in the sun!