have now, who allows himself to be a watcher of a machine, a
turner-of-something for forty years, can hardly be classed as vegetable
life. He is not even organic matter except in a very small part of
himself.

"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.