Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves.  Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will grow up.

Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals:  upon drawing out the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius in each man; the passion, if he has any; the creative desire, the self-expressing, self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy strength there is in him.

Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all employers alike.  Employers have very largely overlooked it.

It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern machine civilization.  We need not be discouraged about machines, because the secret of the machine civilization has as yet barely been noticed.

The elephants are running around in the garden.  But they have merely taken us by surprise.  It is their first and their last chance.  The men about us are seeing what to do.  We are to get control of the elephants, first, by getting control of ourselves.  We are beginning to organize our people-machines as if they were made of people; so that the people in them can keep on being people, and being better ones.  And as our people-machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron machines will no longer be feared.  They will reach over and help.  As we look about us we shall see our iron machines at last, about all the world, all joining in, all hard at work for us, a million, million machines a day making the crowd beautiful.

CHAPTER XI

MACHINES, CROWDS, AND ARTISTS

A crowd civilization produces, as a matter of course, crowd art and art for crowded conditions.  This fact is at once the glory and the weakness of the kind of art a democracy is bound to have.

The most natural evidence to turn to first, of the crowd in a crowd age, is such as can be found in its literature, especially in its masterpieces.

The significance of shaking hands with a Senator of the United States is that it is a convenient and labour-saving way of shaking hands with two or three million people.  The impressiveness of the Senator’s Washington voice, the voice on the floor of the Senate, consists in the mystical undertone—­the chorus in it—­multitudes in smoking cities, men and women, rich and poor, who are speaking when this man speaks, and who are silent when he is silent, in the government of the United States.