A few days later I went through another factory, and I came out weary and spent at night, feeling as unreasonable and almost as hateful about machines, and as discouraged about the people who had to work with them as John Ruskin did in those first early days when the Factory Chimney first lifted its long black flag upon our earth, and bullied great cities into cowards and slaves, and all the great, quiet-hearted nations, and began making for us—­all around us, before our eyes, as though in a kind of jeer at us, and at our queer, pretty, helpless little religions—­the hell we had ceased to believe in.

The hell is here, and is going to be here apparently as long as may be necessary for us to see it and believe in it once more.  If a hell on our own premises, shut down hard over our lives here and now, is what is necessary to make us religious and human once more, if we are reduced to it, and if having a hard, literal hell—­one of our own—­is our only way of seeing things, of fighting our way through to the truth, and of getting once more decisive, manful, commanding ideas of good and evil, I for one can only be glad we have Pittsburgs and Sheffields to hurry us along and soon have it over with.

But while, like Ruskin, any one can look about the machines and see hell, he can see hell to-day, unlike Ruskin, with heaven lined up close beside it.  The machines have come to have souls.  The machines we can see all about us have taken sides.  We can all of us see the machines about us to-day like vast looms, weaving in and weaving out the fate of the world, the fate of the churches, the fate of the women and the little children, and the very fate of God; and everything about us we can see turning at last on what we are doing with the machines that are about us, and what we are letting our machines do with us.

* * * * *

It has cleared my mind, and at least helped me to live side by side with machines better from day to day, to consider what these two souls or spirits in the machines are, and what they are doing and likely to do.  If one knows them and one sees them, and sees how they are working, it is easier to take sides and join in and help.

It would seem to me that there are two spirits in machinery—­the spirit of weariness, weakness, of inventing ways of getting out of work; and there is the spirit in the machines, too, of moving mountains, conquering the sea and air, of working harder and lifting one’s work over to more heroic, to more splendid and difficult, and almost impossible things.  It is these two spirits that are fighting for the possession and control of our machine civilization.  I watch the machines and the men beside them and see which side they are on.  The labourer who is doing as little work as he dares for his wages and the capitalist who is giving as little service as he dares for his money are on the one side (the vast, lazy, mean majority of employers and employees), and there may be seen