Again as adults we are slaves to the ruin of mechanically multiplied things. On every hand, we are stimulated to believe that our worth is in material possessions; school and press and platform inciting us to the lie that we prosper by adding things unto ourselves.... A certain automobile factory decides to build one hundred thousand machines within a year. It is almost like a cataclysm when one begins to consider the maiming of the human spirit which follows in the wake of such a commercial determination. Mortgages, the impulse to stretch the means, the binding slavery to matter to pay, the rivalry of neighbours, actual lapses of integrity, the lie, the theft, the desire, the spoliation of children, the lowered vibration of the house, the worry, the fear—to say nothing of the ten thousand factory workers, each of whom has built nothing.
There are men in that great mound of mills who have merely used a foot, or a wrist, or an eye. Some of these good mechanics hold a file, others screw bolts, for eight hours; the many serve steel to the machines and pluck it forth—eight hours each day. Fifty men of the ten thousand have a concept of the finished task; the rest have but a blind piece to do again and again, until their Order is madness, and all the faculties of the human will are rendered automatic for money, as if any form of wages could pay for these hells of routine.
Each man's sense of origins, his faculties won from Nature, his individuality and dispensations of human spirit, all are deadened. And for this men are said to be paid in dollars; the mill is said to be a marvel for efficiency.
The mercantile directorate that gathers every four days, to clip a wage here and stretch a margin there, is innocent; the man who knocks down another for his purse is but an erring, short-sighted child; the hordes who weaken themselves in waste and indulgence are clean-hearted, since they play fast and loose with what is in a sense their own property—but the efficiency system which uses men this way, is a slayer of more than mind and body. It commits the psychological crime.
A man who has nothing but money to give is bound to be vulgar; and he is never so vulgar as when he thinks he can pay in money for a fine task well done. The man who does an excellent bit of production from his own centres of being, puts his enduring self in it—a self said to be fashioned not of clay. I repeat his work can only be paid for in kind. You cannot buy any bit of fine spirit with money, no gift of love or friendship, no turning toward you of any creative force. That which goes to you for a price, is of the dimension of the price—matter yields unto you matter. You can only purchase a fine instrument, or a fine horse, or the love of woman or child, by presenting a surface that answers. You possess them in so far as you liberate their secrets of expression.
I moved with a rich man about an estate which he had bought—and he didn't know the dogwood from the beech. I doubt if he saw anything but bark and green, shade and sun—a kind of twilight curtain dropped before his eyes. There was a low hill with a mass of stones grouped on top.
"I shall have those taken away," he said idly.
"Why?"
"Why, they're just stones——"