Oil City was going to do all it could to call attention to itself. Citizens would pledge themselves to speak of Oil City to strangers in the train and when on visits to other towns. The city of Newark, New Jersey, is always recommending its own people and visitors to "Think of Newark." Whenever you enter into conversation with an American you find him suddenly drifting towards telling you the name of a hotel to stay at, or of an establishment where they sell "dandy cream," or he is praising the bricks turned out by the local brick works, or the conditions of the employment of labour in some silk works on which his native town is dependent for prosperity. In a widely distributed "Creed of the American" I read, "I remember always that I am a booster." Even fathers refer to their new-born babies as "little boosters." It should be remembered when Americans are boasting of their native land and its institutions that they were cradled in boosting. It is a habit that in many ways has profited America. It has attracted the emigrant more than all that has ever been printed about it. It is a great commercial habit. But it is in the end degrading.

What is the name of the fairy who has muttered an incantation over the Pilgrim Father and changed him into a booster? And is a booster only a Pilgrim Father who brags about the stuff he manufactures?

It seemed to me that by substituting the idea booster for the idea man you get rid of so many of the weak

nesses of flesh and blood. A man who is boosting day in and day out, using his tongue as a sort of living stores' catalogue, is necessarily loyal to the great machine. But loyalty to the machine has its dangers. On my journey to Chicago I made some interesting observations in Natural History. I got into the train at Franklin to go to Oil City, some five or six urban miles. What was my astonishment to see that each of the eight or nine passengers in my car had fixed their railway tickets in the ribbons of their hats, and they themselves were deep in their newspapers. The conductor came along and took the tickets from their hats and examined them, collected those that were due to be given up and punched those that were not, and stuck them back in the ribbons of the hats, the wearers reading their newspapers all the time and making not the slightest sign that they noticed what the conductor was doing. The only sign of consciousness I observed was a sort of subtle pleasure in acting so the sort of mild pleasure which suffuses the faces of lunatics when they are humoured by visitors to the asylum. They were shamming that they were machinery, and in almost the same style as the man who is under the delusion that he is a teapot, one arm being his spout and the other his handle.

Thus the elevator man in the Department Store also thinks himself a bit of machinery. He seems to be trained to act mechanically, and never to alter the

staccato patter that comes from his mouth at each floor. He speaks like a human phonograph.

Then all waiters, shop-attendants, barbers, and the like try to behave like manikins. Most of all, in the language of Americans is the mechanical obsession apparent. A man who is confined in a hospital writes: "I'm holding down a bed in the hospital over here." The man who meets another and brings him along, simply "collects" him in America. The baseball team that beats another 6-0 "slips a six-nothing defeat" on them. Especially in baseball reports, commercialism and rhythms heard in great "works" abound.

The influence of great machinery gets to the heart of the people. A man when he joins a gang of workmen is taught to co-operate; he has to trim off any original or personal way of doing things, and fit in with the rest of the gang. When the gang is going mechanically and easily, a man quicker than the rest is taken as leader, and the speed of the work is raised. The mechanical action in each individual is intensified, is perfected. Cinematograph films are even taken of gangs at work; the pictures are shown before experts, who indicate weak points, recommend discharges or alterations and show how the gangs can be reconstituted to work more smoothly. Each man is drilled to act like a machine, and the drilling enters into the fibre of his being to such an extent that when work is over his muscles move habitually in certain directions,

and the rhythm of his day's labour controls his language and his thought.

In the factory it is the same. In a vast mechanical contrivance there is just one thing that machinery cannot do; so between two immense complicated engines it is necessary to place a human link. A man goes there, and flesh and blood is grafted into steel and oil. The man performs his function all day, but he also senses the great machine in his mind and his soul; and when he goes out to vote for his President, or talk to men and women about the world in which he lives, he does so more as a standardised bit of mechanism, than as a tender human being.

Alas, for the men and women who wear out and cease to be serviceable! They are the old iron, and their place is the scrap-heap. "White trash" is the name by which they go.

Bernard Shaw, and indeed many others, look forward to the diminution of toil by machinery. The minimising of toil is to them a great blessing. Because machinery lessens toil they are on the side of machinery. Meanwhile life shows a paradox. The Russian peasant

who works without machines toils less than the American who takes advantage of every invention. The Russian emigrant who comes to America simply does not know what work is, and he stares in amazement at the angry foreman who tells him, when he is at it at his hardest, to "get a move on yer."

In America the Americans slave; they slave for dollars, for more business, for advancement, but in the end for dollars only, I suppose. They will fill up any odd moment with some work that will bring in money. They will make others work, and take the last ounce of energy out of their employees. The machine itself is the size of America, and only in little nooks and corners can anything spring up that is not of the machine. Even millionaires know nothing more to do than to go on making millions. Yet there is not a feverish anxiety to get money. Losses are borne with equanimity. It's just a matter of "the apple tree's loaded with fruit. I'm going up to get another apple."

Present experience shows that machinery increases the toil of mankind. It need not increase it, but it does. It might diminish it, but there are many reasons why it does not. For one thing, it increases the standard of living. It makes rocking-chairs, porch-swings, automobiles, and the like indispensable things. First, machinery makes the things, then the things make the machinery duplicate themselves. So it raises the standard of living and increases the toil of mankind. It is going on increasing the standard of living for the rich, for the middle-class aping the rich, and for the working men aping the middle-class.

Is it good, then, that the standard of living is being raised? Well, no; because the standard of living