strap. Liverymen have cyclometres to help customers to tell the truth,
and the Australian ballot is invented to help men to be manly enough to
vote the way they think. And when, in the course of human events, we
came to the essentially moral and spiritual reform of a woman's right to
dress in good taste--that is, appropriately for what she is doing, what
did we proceed to do to bring it about? Conventions were held year after
year, and over and over, to get women to dress as they wanted to; dress
reform associations were founded, syndicates of courage were established
all over the land--all in vain; and finally,--Heaven help us!--how was
this great moral and spiritual reform accomplished? By an invention of
two wheels, one in front of the other. It was brought about by the Pope
Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut in two short years.

Everything is brought about by manufacturing companies. It is the
socialist spirit; the idea that, if we can only find it, there is some
machine that can surely be invented that will take the place of men: not
only of hands and feet, but of all the old-fashioned and lumbering
virtues, courage, patience, vision, common sense, and religion itself,
out of which they are made.

But we depend upon machinery not only for the things that we want, but
for the brains with which we decide what we want. If a man wants to know
what he thinks, he starts a club; and if he wants to be very sure, he
calls a convention. From the National Undertakers' Association and the
Launderers' League to the Christian Endeavour Tournament and the World's
Congress--the Midway Pleasance of Piety--the Convention strides the
world with vociferousness. The silence that descends from the hills is
filled with its ceaseless din. The smallest hamlet in the land has
learned to listen reverent from afar to the vast insistent roar of It,
as the Voice of the Spirit of the Times.