Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.

CHAPTER IX

THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS

I would not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house that is not hand-made.  I have come to believe that machinery is going to make it possible for everybody to have hand-made things in their homes, things that have been made by people who love to make them, and by people who, thinks to the machines, are soon bound to have time to make them.  Some will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made ideas.  Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to enjoy hand-made ideas, to enjoy hand-made books—­and enjoy reading books by hand.  We may have time for following an author in a book in the slow, old, deep, loving, happy, hand-made fashion we used to know—­when we have enough machines.

It looks as if it might be something like this.

Every man is going to spend his mornings in the basement of society, taking orders and being a servant and executing automatically, like a machine if need be, the will of the world, making what the world wants in the way it wants it, expressing society and subordinating himself.  In the afternoon he shall come up out of the basement, and take his stand on the ground floor of the world, stop being a part of the machinery, and be a man, express himself and give orders to himself and do some work he loves to do in the way he loves to do it, express his soul in his labour, and be an artist.  He will not select his work in the morning, or select his employer, or say how the work shall be done.  He will himself be selected, like a young tree or like an iron nail, because he is the best made and best fitted thing at hand to be used in a certain place and in a certain way.

When the man has been selected for his latent capacities, his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that three times as much work can be got out of him as he could get out of himself.  A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary, thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall be lent him to show him how his work can be done.  The accumulated science and genius, the imagination and experience, of hundreds of years, of all climates, of all countries, of all temperaments shall be heaped up by his employers, gathered about the man’s mind, wrought through his limbs, and help him to do his work.

All labour down in the basement of society shall be skilled labour.  The brains of men of genius and of experts shall be pumped into labour from above until every man in the basement shall earn as much money in three hours a day as he formerly had earned in nine.