Between the morbidly mechanical people and the morbidly unmechanical people, modern civilization hangs in the balance.

There must be some way of being just mechanical enough, and at the right time and right place, and of being just unmechanical enough at the right time and right place.  And there must be some way in which men can be mechanical and unmechanical at will.

The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to their souls, like telephones and wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like radium and railroads, and who know when and when not and how and how not to use them who are so used to using machines quietly and powerfully, that they do not let the machines outwit them and unman them.

Who are these men?

How do they do it?

They are the Machine-Trainers.  The men who understand people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron machines run softly together.

CHAPTER VII

THE MEN’S MACHINES

There was a time once in the old simple individual days when drygoods stores could be human.  They expressed, in a quiet, easy way, the souls of the people who owned them.

When machinery was invented and when organization was invented—­machines of people—­drygoods stores became vast selling machines.

We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store with fifteen.

This problem has been essentially and in principle solved.  At least we know it is about to be solved.  We are ready to admit—­most of us—­that it is practicable for a department store to be human.  Everything the man at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his clerks.  His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature.  What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores work—­the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks—­thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over their souls, making them and keeping them human.  The stream clears itself.

But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the ground?  And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground?

In a department store the employer expresses himself to his clerks through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle and stir their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to all of them through them all.