“But it is not the mechanical machine which makes the man unspiritual.  It is the mechanical man beside the machine.  A master at a piano (which is a machine) makes it a spiritual thing; and a master at a printing-press, like William Morris, makes it a free and artistic and self-expressive thing.”

I spent a day a little while ago in walking through a factory.  I went past miles of machines—­great glass roofs of sunshine over them—­and looked in the faces of thousands of men.  As I went through the machines I kept looking to and fro between the machines and the men who stood beside them, and sometimes I came back and looked again at the machines and the men beside them; and every machine, or nearly every machine, I saw (any one could see it in that factory) was making a man of somebody.  One could see the spirit of the man who invented the machine, and the spirit of the man who worked with it, and the spirit of the man who owned it and who placed it there with the man, all softly, powerfully running together.  There were exceptions, and every now and then one came, of course, upon the man who seemed to be simply another and somewhat different contrivance or attachment to his machine—­some part that had been left over and thought of last, and had not been done as well as the others; but the factory, taken as a whole, from the manager’s offices and the great counting-room, and from the tall chimneys to the dump, seemed to me to have something fresh and human and unwonted about it.  It seemed to be a factory that had a look, a look of its own.  It was like a vast countenance.  It had features, an expression.  It had an air—­well, one must say it, of course, if one is driven to it:  the factory had a soul, and was humming it.  Any one could have seen why by going into his office and talking a little while with the owner, or by even not talking to him—­by seeing him look up from his desk.  After walking through several miles of his personality, and up and down and down and up the corridors of his mind, one did not really need to meet him except as a matter of form and as a finishing touch.  One had been visiting with him all along:  to look in his face was merely to sum it up, to see it all, the whole place, over again in one look.  One did not need to be surprised; one might have known what such a man would be like—­that such a factory could only be conceived and wrought by a man of genius, a kind of lighted-up man.  A man who had put not only skylights in his buildings, but skylights in his men, would have to have a skylight in himself (a skylight with a motor attachment, of course).

If one were to try to think in nature or in art of something that would be like him—­well, some kind of transcendental engine, I should say, running softly, smoothly outdoors in a great sunshine, would have given one a good idea of him.  But, however this may be, it certainly would have been quite impossible to go through his factory and ever say again that machines do not and could not have souls, or at least over-souls, and that men who worked with machines did not and could not have souls as fast as they were allowed to.