other: one after the other they rose and shrieked and fell. The final state of ecstasy was approaching for them all. From the far side of the court, like a messenger from the infernal regions, strode a giant African, naked save for a loin-cloth, his black muscles rippling and gleaming under the light of the pendent lamps. His great hands held a broad tray, which was glistening with sharp lights. A dervish flung himself upon the tray and, seizing a handful of the broken glass, thrust the jagged fragments into his mouth, then pressed his hands against his forehead and collapsed. Three times the negro disappeared and reappeared, bearing his fiendish offering. It was all hide ous, but I was rooted to the spot. I was waiting-waiting for something; for what I did not know. I dared not look at Rackham, but I heard his heavy breathing close beside me. The floor was littered with crumpled white figures lying in ghastly immobility.

Once more the negro strode into the court, and a dervish rose to meet him -a dervish who had passed hitherto unnoticed, who had been in the last rank of his company. This time the tray did not hold broken glass: a red

glow rose from its surface. The dervish stepped forward and stretched out two long, powerful hands; when he withdrew them they grasped two bars of red-hot metal. Then he stepped directly beneath one of the lamps, and I saw his olive face, his dark eyes, and his high curving nose. Rackham's fingers bit suddenly into the muscles of my arm, but I could not move. The man stood rigidly upright beneath the lamp, his head held high. And as I looked into that face I saw the living image of human ecstasy. Never have I seen such happiness as in that countenance. A light that fell from no lamp illumined it; the eyes blazed with an unearthly flame; on the face was a dawning smile of recognition, as though those eyes now saw for the first time what they had always sought. Time paused in that instant: it was eternal. Then the long hands were lifted, and the red irons drew level with the eyes, which dimmed the metal's sullen glow. The smile rose as the sun rises; there was no longer any doubt. Then a quick motion, and a faint sound came to us as of a flaming match quenched in water.

KNOW there are self-winding phonographs, self-starting motor-cars, self-filling pens, and that the Mayor of Chicago will shortly be able to speak by radio with the King of Abyssinia. But these are frills. Socially, the most interesting experiments being made with modern machinery are those that might inadvertently put us back in the Middle Ages, minus their tournaments and their scramble after food, but plus our own control over the forces of production.

I have suggested, in an earlier paper in THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, some of the reasons why these machines of ours, despite their conquest of the field, are meeting with a certain new hostility. One man objects that the machine age drives us at a fierce, relentless pace.

Another resents the way it packs us more and more in crowded cities. A third condemns the monotony of factory routine. A fourth fears that our new instruments of centralized control will enable power to be cornered by an ever smaller group of sovereigns. Still another laments the standardization of manners and morals characteristic of our day, the loss of that old-time variety which marked Athens off from Troy, Florence from Siena, even Boston from Virginia. To-day the same machine civilization is spreading everywhere. Those mis

sionaries in the South Sea islands, clapping Mother Hubbards on new converts, are the true symbols of our modern age.

In all the attacks on industrialism, and in all the defenses of it, nothing is more interesting than the fact that much attention is given to speculation about what men will do with their machinery, and little to what machinery may be doing with itself.

§ 2

Power, applied to making things and moving them, has brought more new instruments of conquest, happiness, and misery into the world in the last hundred years than men had found in all the span of time between George Washington and Rameses I. And power to-day is at a cross-roads.

This energy that drives our engines and our factories we derive chiefly from two sources. One is water-power; the other, coal. What we could do with water-power if we used it all, and could apply it to the right contacts, the engineers have sketched for us. There is enough water-power going to waste in New York State, some of them estimate, to stoke every electric-light plant in that commonwealth, with enough left over for the railways. But that we also waste coal magnificently is not so

generally recognized. We waste it, first, in the way we mine it, then in the way we burn it. One third of the coal in the ground we waste in mining; four fifths of the rest, even in the most modern plants, converting raw material into power. More than that, one ton of coal in every five brought from the mines is used for transportationused, that is, to haul from one place to another various things, including the four other tons of coal brought up in the same day's mining. And in each of these processes the totals are stupendous. There is coal enough dug in one year to build a wall the size of China's across the whole United States. And coal enough dug the next year to lift that barricade into space for a distance of a hundred miles.

Totals of that sort have caught the eye of engineers. They see, on one side, a vast supply of power being wasted; on the other, many spots to make it work. How can they carry power from source to destination with the least waste as it goes along? Burn coal at the mouth of the mines, harness streams with turbines, turn raw energy into electric power; then let it wing itself wherever it is wanted. The problem is one of transmitting electricity without appreciable leakage on the way.

And with that problem the engineers are gaining ground consistently. Already they are sending power across country at 220,000 volts, fully a thousand times what Edison used barely forty years ago when he brought his apparatus to New York. Transmission of high voltages is measurably more practical than it was even a short year ago. Within the last six months remarkable results have been obtained with various forms of new sending

apparatus; with vacuum-tubes, for instance, especially one known as the "magnetron." Meantime, while one set of engineers experiments with transmission over long-distance lines, others try transmission without any lines at all. Every radio message means, of course, the transmission of at least a small amount of power. The problem here is how to direct wireless waves so closely that a large part of their power holds together instead of scattering to the four winds. Dr. Irving Langmuir of the General Electric Company points out that the energy used in radio-tubes has been increased more than a million-fold these last ten years, and asserts that "a few more years of the same rate of improvement would bring us beyond our wildest dreams." "All we need to say," he believes, "is that science and engineering have a new tool. It marks a turning-point like that determined by the steam-engine and the dynamo."

It may be wireless that will bridge the gap; perhaps high-tension lines. We know that Herbert Hoover has thrown his prestige as an engineer behind the ultimate success of a superpower plan, and that a host of fellowengineers are actually at work upon the problem. Gifford Pinchot, Governor of Pennsylvania and for two decades a close student of the development of this country's store of native wealth, "looks forward confidently to the growth of a nation-wide interlocking power system." Dr. Charles P. Steinmetz, known to newspaper fame as the man who "made lightning," predicts that we are on the eve of far-reaching innovations. "Franklin said that he would like to be sealed up in a wine cask for a hundred years and then come out and view the world

ity will be used so generally that the cost will likely be apportioned on the basis of a tax, like our water tax to-day. The charge will probably be so much a plug, as we are now charged so much a faucet. Electricity will be so cheap that it will not pay to have metres installed, readings taken, and a system of accounts kept." This is presuming, of course, that power is always controlled publicly in the interest of its consumers. Water itself would not be cheap if one monopoly or another were privileged to speculate in public thirst.

Now, it will be observed that the men engaged in an engineering feat involving a vast distribution of cheap power are not approaching that problem from the point of view of the evangelist or the reformer. They are tackling a problem in the waste of energy, which, it happens, can be solved only by hustling power from point "A" to point "B" with a minimum of waste in transit. But this very enterprise, this hustling along of power, may have results as socially fundamental as the efforts of a brigade of reformers or a whole army of evangelists. It may pave the way for a decentralization of industry.

That is a tremendous phrase, and it is interesting that the engineers themselves should give us cause to use it. To-day factories cluster about the sources of power, or the sources to which power can easily be brought, like flies about a sugar-bowl: steel about the coal-mines of Pennsylvania, for example; flour about the waterfalls of Minneapolis. All this is something so familiar that we accept it without question, like hills and valleys, forgetting that it is the work of one brief moment in a long hour of history. To be sure, the association between an industry and its power site may to-day be artificial. It may be the remnant of something real enough a generation back, but something now replaced by such a man-made factor as a favorable freight differential, giving one locality or one group of manufacturers an advantage over all competitors. But in either case, real or artificial, imagine power flowing into small cities "so cheap that it will not pay to have metres installed," and the smaller centers of industry no longer have the odds against them. In fact, their proximity to local sources of raw materials, wheat, leather, timber, and the like, may even give them an advantage.

What am I assuming here? First, that power can be distributed at low cost, and will be distributed fairly to all comers. Second, that when a finished product leaves its factory it can be shipped to its market on fair terms, and not on the fictitious terms of fairness now obtaining on our transit lines. With that equality before the law, decentralization may become distinctly profitable. Even the experience of Henry Ford, high priest of "mass production," suggests such an

outcome. For Ford has already abandoned his methods of centralized production so far as the assembling of his cars is concerned. Only enough Fords are put together in Detroit to meet local needs. To economize on transportation charges, nine out of ten are shipped, conveniently packed as "parts," to assembling-stations nearer local markets. Put cheap power in those local stations, and Ford may also ship some of the processes of manufacture.

Decentralization of industry is a project endless in its possibilities. I shall come back to it again. Here I turn aside to note briefly two other current tendencies in the development of our machines. One is an obvious tendency in the direction of a shorter workday. We have come from a sixteen-hour day to a moderately well established eight-hour day, and there is no reason to believe that with the perfection of machinery and management the impetus will stop there. Somewhat less assured, however, is the second tendency I have in mind. Will machinery develop in the direction of efficient small-scale production?

There is a good deal in the history of our whirring engines to suggest that such a thing may happen. Watch a modern printing-press in action if you would see the sort of thing I mean. Innumerable little iron elbows jerk wide rolls of paper where they ought to go. Innumerable little wrists of steel spin wet ink-rollers over type. Innumerable little thumbs and fingers pull the printed paper from the press, and fold it, pile it, even count it, as it stacks. Ten men can handle an edition now that would have needed a small army fifty years ago. "R. U. R.," that Broadway drama picturing

the coming of mechanical workmen, does not go half far enough in its conception. Not only have we Robots in our workshops; we have parts of Robots: little fellows, one thumb, perhaps, and nothing more; legs and shoulders would be wasted.

Up to this point what I have been presuming as the possible achievement of super-power is simply some decentralization of industry geographically, with the principles of specialized mass production undisturbed. I have been presuming, for example, that a motorcar might be made more economically, taking advantage of proximity to local sources of supply, in six places than in one, with the actual assembling performed, as it is performed to-day, on the threshold of the market.

But the Robots who help print our morning papers suggest another outcome. Those Robots have of course invaded other industries as well as printing. They are invading very basic industries. There is a man in Kentucky perfecting a “one-man flour mill" no larger than a carpet-sweeper. Machinery has been so far developed in many industries that it turns out products whole, as printing-presses turn out papers. Men simply feed in raw material at one end, take out a finished product at the other. With any vast development of machinery in this direction, a revival of efficient small-scale production looms up as a real possibility. I do not mean that whole motor-cars would be made in cottage factories. Hauling the rarer sorts of raw materials from distant points would be uneconomical, even if you could conceive the appropriate cottage engine making motor-cars as masterfully as our Robot press manipulates its ink and paper. What I am