In my morning paper the other day I read that in a factory whose long windows I often pass in the train, they have their machinery so perfected that it takes sixty-four machines to make one shoe.

Query—­If it takes sixty-four machines run by sixty-four men who do nothing else to make one shoe, how many machines would it take, and how many shoes, to make one man?

Query—­And when an employer in a shoe factory deals with his employee, can it really be said, after all, that he is dealing with him?  He is dealing with It—­with Nine Hours a Day, of one sixty-fourth of a man.

The natural effect of crowds and of machines is to make a man feel that he is, and always was, and always will be, immemorially, unanimously, innumerably nobody.

Sometimes we are allowed a little faint numeral to dangle up over our oblivion.  Not long ago I saw a notice or letter in the West Bulletin—­probably from a member of something—­ending like this:  “...  I hope the readers of the Bulletin will ponder over this suggestion of Number 29,619.—­Sincerely yours, No. 11, 175.”

CHAPTER III

THE INCONVENIENCE OF BEING HUMAN

I shall never forget one day I spent in New York some years ago—­more years than I thought at first.  It was a wrong-headed day, but I cannot help remembering it as a symbol of a dread I still feel at times in New York—­a feeling of being suddenly lifted, of being swept out under (it is like the undertow of the sea) into a kind of vast deep of impersonality—­swept out of myself into a wide, imperious waste or emptiness of people.  I had come fresh from my still country meadow and mountain, my own trees and my own bobolinks and my own little island of sky up over me, and in the vast and desolate solitude of men and women I wandered about up and down the streets.  Every block I saw, every window, skyline, engine, street-car, every human face, made me feel as if I belonged to another world.  Here was a great conspiracy in stone and iron against my own life with myself.  Was there a soul in all this huge roar and spectacle of glass and stone and passion that cared for the things that I cared for, or the things that I loved, or that would care one shuffle of all the feet upon the stones for any thought or word or desire of mine?  The rain swept in my face, and I spent the day walking up and down the streets looking at stones and glass and people. "Here we are!" say the great buildings crowding on the sky. "Who are you?"....all the stone and the glass and the walls, the mighty syndicate of matter everywhere, surrounded me—­one little, shivering, foolish mote of being fighting foolishly for its own little foolish mote of identity!