Social Decay and Regeneration #229210

Some fifteen years ago a brilliant young American, Gerald Stanley Lee, wrote as a sort of "Introduction to the Twentieth Century" a book called "The Voice of the Machines." It was one long pæan of joy, infused with much genuine poetic feeling. Man is a machine and the creator of machines. He is turning all life into machinery; modern religion is a machine; education is a machine; government is a machine; trade is a machine; society, literature, journalism, art-all are machines. There is nothing in our modern world that we can do or have or hope to have which is not bound up with machinery. It is in machinery that we must seek for poetry and for beauty and for the infinite. Those persons who still fail to see this are blind, even already dead; they do not belong to our time.<br><br>Mr. Lee's book is still worth reading. It contained a genuine element of truth which had too often been overlooked. Yet it was not the whole truth, and where true it was not impossible to view the matter from an altogether different angle. Ever since the Industrial Revolution began, more than a century ago, there has been an obscure and smouldering resentment against the mechanization of work and life. Among the workers, indeed, whose sound instincts may have felt more than they were able to express, the introduction of machinery, we know, led at first to open revolt and disorder.