god might have envied, but who, having not the modern machinery of war,
fall powerless. The day of the primary import to humanity of the strength
in man's extensor and flexor muscles, whether in labours of war or of
peace, is gone by for ever; and the day of the all-importance of the
culture and activity of man's brain and nerve has already come.

The brain of one consumptive German chemist, who in his laboratory
compounds a new explosive, has more effect upon the wars of the modern
peoples than ten thousand soldierly legs and arms; and the man who invents
one new labour-saving machine may, through the cerebration of a few days,
have performed the labour it would otherwise have taken hundreds of
thousands of his lusty fellows decades to accomplish.

Year by year, month by month, and almost hour by hour, this change is
increasingly showing itself in the field of the modern labour; and crude
muscular force, whether in man or beast, sinks continually in its value in
the world of human toil; while intellectual power, virility, and activity,
and that culture which leads to the mastery of the inanimate forces of
nature, to the invention of machinery, and to that delicate manipulative
skill often required in guiding it, becomes ever of greater and greater
importance to the race. Already today we tremble on the verge of a
discovery, which may come tomorrow or the next day, when, through the
attainment of a simple and cheap method of controlling some widely
diffused, everywhere accessible, natural force (such, for instance, as the
force of the great tidal wave) there will at once and for ever pass away
even that comparatively small value which still, in our present stage of
material civilisation, clings to the expenditure of mere crude, mechanical,
human energy; and the creature, however physically powerful, who can merely
pull, push, and lift, much after the manner of a machine, will have no
further value in the field of human labour.