The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question.  All civilization seems crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him—­now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, “Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human as a department store?”

This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work—­who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work.  They will base all that they do upon certain resemblances and certain differences between people and machines.

They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron.

They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human nature.

There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and general principles concerning the natural working relation between men and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a basis for a possible solution.

What are our machines after all?  How are the machines like us?  And on what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a world like this to run softly together?  These are the questions men are going to answer next.  In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in our civilization—­because they are machines—­is likely to be able to do much to save the men in it.

CHAPTER VIII

THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD

Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body.  All the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small of a man’s back.

About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.

It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him.  It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday hard work of living.  The other brain, the one with which he does his thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the cupola of his being, is a comparatively light-working organ, merely his own private personal brain—­a conscious, small, and supposably controllable affair.  He holds on to his own particular identity with it.  The great lower brain in the small of his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of eternity—­while he goes by.