THE MASTER
By LORD DUNSANY
,
theSe days one can scarce fail to notice that responsible persons everywhere are uneasy about the state of the world ; and whether one believes the League of Nations to be the product of a plan profoundly wise, or whether one regards it as childish, its very existence is evidence of that uneasiness. The uneasiness, as everyone knows, arises from the well-grounded fear that another war may wreck our civilisation, and the League of Nations has recently shown its understanding of such a danger by its earnest efforts to prevent the war in Abyssinia. But have they gone to the root of the trouble ? Is not war the test and touchstone of civilisa- tion? Why should war suddenly threaten us with universal ruin ? Is war worse than it used to be ? Undoubtedly, Yes. Then the next qhestion is, Why ? Is this the fault of war, that is to say of soldiers ? Do soldiers demand more horrible weapons, in order to make a more ghastly war; or do our civilisations Provide them with worse and worse machines ? Is it all the fault of armies, or of the civilisation that breeds them ? I think that the trouble lies deeper than the bloodthirstiness of soldiers, or persons called militarists, which has been receiving all the blame. I believe that the fault lies in our civilisation, which has been growing too artificial, and Which therefore regards with more and more apprehension the test to which civilisations are periodically put. And if any system does grow too unnatural, it comes to an end even without war, as ruins of cities in Asia seem to testify, where the jungle has quietly gone like a tide over some of them without any clear evidence of conquest.
And why should I fear that our system is growing un- natural ? Suppose that in one of the Southern States of America it were to be noticed that the only music was the beating of tom-toms, that the social customs were those of the tropics, and the only worship the worship of African idols, would it not then be supposed that the families of the slaves once brought from Africa were in the ascendancy and had become the masters ? I notice a very similar trend in England. The slave here was not im- ported, but created. It was created by James Watt, Stevenson and others, and never had man a more obedient slave. Machinery carried man wherever lie wanted to go ; it began to take him up and down stairs ; it did his work in the hay-fields ; and man remained his own self for a while, and followed his old occupations, and was quite unchanged in appearance. Gradually the families began to drift away from the hay-fields to work in towns for the machines, but I doubt if the change was much noticed. And then one day during the first decade of this century man's very appearance began to change. He used, while he was master, to manufacture razors for such of his children as needed them, and for many years the machine manufactured them at his bidding. Now the machine makes as many blades as it can, and every man has to shave to keep pace with the demands of the machine. There is hardly a beard to be seen in England, and moustaches grow rarer and rarer. Why ? The machine doesn't like them. Man must shave to. keep the machineot its pastime. Ifhedid not, he would be thought peculiar, and almost rebellious ; for world-wide shaving is a whim of-the machine, and the machine is .master. But this is a trifle compared to the exile of man from the hay- fields, exchanging healthy work for work in factories, where he serves the employment-saving machines, ex- changing companionship too with the sun, and the evening, with the twilight and . harvest moon, for . sounds and shapes and air to which he has not been attuned.
To look upon the machine as still our servant seems a . symptom of having slept for a hundred years. What woke me from my own sleep more than anything else • was a house that I saw in London, built where a line house had stood. I sprang awake with a start. It was not only a residence fit for a machine, but it almost looked like a fragment of a monstrous piece of machinery : it looked like a section of an enormous chimney of iron. Now, man is a fanciful creature : the machine is not fanciful, it is merely efficient. Consequently, when you see wreaths of flowers, winged figures, and shapes from .the splendours of fable, worked upon metal or stone, you know that man here is the master. But when you see man himself living in a house made of plain pieces of metal, unornamented by anything to show that, though he is building in iron, he prefers flowers ; that, though he lives on earth, he has imagined heavens ; • or that he has ever dreamed or loved anything ; that . he has ever had any illusion about himself that he believes is denied to the pig ; then you see clearly enough that the machine is his master now. In such a house the chairs might be made of steel bars utterly unornamented, unmarked by any fancy of man ; for though- man helps the machine to work, its products are purely mechanical, showing in every one of their grim inches only the handi- work of the master and none of the slave, man. - Of course the machine and its dominance of our life will have its supporters ; all tyrants have many. Give -.me a ton of steel .bars, some will say, before all your romantic fancies. Yet the habit of blotting out a defeated race, men, women and children, was gradually broken in Europe by a romantic and chiValrous people ; a people that, inefficient and slack though it seems to modern eye, would never have poisoned their adversaries in battle, or killed women and children. For a couple of centuries such things were not much done by anybody; and poisoning indeed by none. Exceptions there certainly were,- but they were not so deliberately premeditated • by chivalry as they seem to be by the mechanical age. since the year 1915.- Has man's nature -corrupted • without any known cause ? Or is it that he has come under the dominance of a thing without romance or compassion, and is no longer the master ?
The evils of war are obvious, but they are not the only great evils. I have seen photographs of workmen's houses in Russia that look like heaps of great packing- eases brought together by chance and untidiness.- The -great danger of such things as that is that men will sicken of them, or at any rate women will sicken of them, and man will rebel against the machine that put them together. The peril that seems to threaten us lies deeper than the next war ; it is the risk that there may be a rebellion against the machine ; beeause its work and its aims are unworthy of the spirit of man ; • a struggle of man to be free once more to go his simple human way, as he used to do before the discovery of petrol. Such a rebellion is nothing pleasant to con- template ; for we live all amongst the machines, and whatever smashes them will surely deal hardly with us. And yet nothing is surer than that ignoble aims cannot dominate the world for long ; nor can Nature be altered, nor even be departed from far ; and the machine is leading us on a divergent path, to which we were perhaps first misdirected, in -all innocence,- by James Watt. What will happen ? Can the reckless triumph of the machine be checked ? Or must it go on till it involves us all in its crash ?
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