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THE PROJECTION OF NERVES
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century hated machinery with a personal hatred. The chief of these was Ruskin, who can hardly mention it without scorn. The idealism of William Morris was expressed largely in crafstmanship as opposed to machine-made things. Carlyle did not extend his lectures on heroes so as to include the artisan. He ended with the hero as poet and as man of letters, thus far and no further! He often makes comparisons between men and machines, and even trees and machines, greatly to the disadvantage of the latter. For example, "O, that we could displace the machine god and put a man god in his place!" and "I find no similitude of life so true as this of a tree! Beautiful! Machine of the universe! Do but think of that in contrast!"

But it was reserved for the workers themselves to hate machinery in earnest—not in word only, but in deed. A machine is never perhaps quite a soulless thing to the person who works it, or who has made it (that is perhaps why the engine-driver alludes to his engine as "her" not "it," and why the sailor speaks of his vessel as if it were a woman). And when in the eighteenth century a half-mad boy smashed a machine because it seemed to rob him or hurt him, the learned felt pity, but the workers felt sympathy. They came to hate machinery with a personal