We fit the
collar on unwilling necks; and when their service is over we bid
them go out free; but we break the good Mosaic law and send them
away empty. What wonder there is so little willing service, so few
ears ready to be thrust through against the master's door.
The swift stride of civilisation is leaving behind individual
effort, and turning man into the Daemon of a machine. To and fro
in front of the long loom, lifting a lever at either end, paces he
who once with painstaking intelligence drove the shuttle. THEN he
tasted the joy of completed work, that which his eye had looked
upon, and his hands had handled; now his work is as little finished
as the web of Penelope. Once the reaper grasped the golden corn
stems, and with dexterous sweep of sickle set free the treasure of
the earth. Once the creatures of the field were known to him, and
his eye caught the flare of scarlet and blue as the frail poppies
and sturdy corn-cockles laid down their beauty at his feet; now he
sits serene on Juggernaut's car, its guiding Daemon, and the field
is silent to him.
As with the web and the grain so with the wood and stone in the
treasure-house of our needs. The ground was accursed FOR OUR SAKE
that in the sweat of our brow we might eat bread. Now the many
live in the brain-sweat of the few; and it must be so, for as
little as great King Cnut could stay the sea until it had reached
the appointed place, so little can we raise a barrier to the wave
of progress, and say, "Thus far and no further shalt thou come.
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