want. I try to analyze it and think it out. What is the thing, the real
thing in the Hand-made World, that fills me with pride and joy, and that
I cannot and will not give up? Is not the real thing that is in it
something that can be or might be freed from it, exhaled from it,
something that might be in some new form saved, made an atmosphere or a
spirit and passed on? And what is it in the new Machine-made World
which, in spite of the splendid joy, a rough new, wild religion there is
in it, keeps daily filling me as I go past machines with this
contradictory obstinate dread of them? After a time I have made a little
cleared space in my mind, a little breathing room. It has come to me
from thinking that what is beautiful in the Hand-made World perhaps is
not these particular Hand-made things themselves at which I so delight,
but the Hand-made spirit of the men who made them which the men put into
the things. And perhaps what is full of death and fear in the
Machine-made World is not the machines themselves, but the Machine-made
spirit in which the men who run the machines have made the machines
work. Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is pervasive, eternal. Perhaps it can
escape like a spirit, and can live where it will live, and do what it
will do, like a spirit, and possess the body that it wills to possess.
Perhaps the Hand-made spirit is still living around me to-day, and is
not only living, but is living in a more unspeakable, unbounded body
than any spirit has ever lived in before, and is to-day before our eyes,
laying its huge iron fingers around our little earth, and holding the
oceans in its hand, and brushing away mountains with a breath, until we
have Man at last playing all night through the sky, with visions and
airships and telescopes. His very words walk on the air with soft and
unseen feet.

It is the Hand-made spirit that creates machines. The machines
themselves are still the mighty children of the men who move and work in