From “Critical Studies,” Chap. x.

EVERY invention of what is called science takes the human race further and further from nature, nearer and nearer to an artificial, unnatural, and dependent state. One seems to hear the laugh of Goethe’s Mephistopheles behind the hiss of steam; and in the tinkle of the electric bell there lurks the chuckle of glee with which the tempter sees the human fools take as a boon and a triumph the fatal gifts he has given.

  What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? What shall it profit the world to put a girdle about its loins in forty minutes when it shall have become a desert of stone, a wilderness of streets, a treeless waste, a songless city, where man shall have destroyed all life except his own, and can hear no echo of his heart’s pulsation save in the throb of an iron piston?

  The engine tearing through the disemboweled mountain, the iron and steel houses towering against a polluted sky, the huge cylinders generating electricity and gas, the network of wires cutting across the poisoned air, the overgrown cities spreading like scurvy, devouring every green thing like locusts; haste instead of leisure; neurasthenia instead of health, mania instead of sanity, egotism and terror instead of courage and generosity,—these are the gifts which the modern mind creates for the world. It can chemically imitate every kind of food and drink; it can artificially produce every form of disease and suffering; it can carry death in a needle and annihilation in an odor; it can cross an ocean in five days; it can imprison the human voice in a box; it can make a dead man speak from a paper cylinder; it can transmit thoughts over hundreds of miles of wire; it can turn a handle and discharge scores of death-dealing tubes at one moment as easily as a child can play a tune on a barrel organ; it can pack death and horror up in a small tin case which has served for sardines or potted herrings, and leave it on a window sill; and cause by it towers to fall, and palaces to crumble, and flames to upleap to heaven, and living men to change to calcined corpses; all this it can do, and much more. But it cannot give back to the earth, or to the soul, “the sweet, wild freshness of morning.” And when all is said of its great inventions and their marvels and mysteries, are they more marvelous or more mysterious than the changes of chrysalis and caterpillar and butterfly, or the rise of the giant oak from the tiny acorn, or the flight of swallow and nightingale over ocean and continent?

  Man has created for himself in the iron beast a greater tyrant than any Nero or Caligula. And what is the human child of the iron beast; what is the typical, notable, most conspicuous creation of the iron beast’s epoch?

  It is the Cad, vomited forth from every city and town in hundreds, thousands, millions, with every holy day and holy-day. The chief creation of modern life is the Cad; he is an exclusively modern manufacture, and it may safely be said that the poorest slave in Hellas, the meanest fellah in Egypt, the humblest pariah in Asia, was a gentleman beside him. The Cad is the entire epitome, the complete blossom and fruit in one, of what we are told is an age of culture. Behold him in the velodrome as he yells insanely after his kind as they tear along on their tandem machines in a match, and then ask yourself candidly, O my reader, if any age before this in all the centuries of earth ever produced any creature so utterly low and loathsome, so physically, mentally, individually, and collectively hideous. The helot of Greece, the gladiator of Rome, the swashbuckler of mediæval Europe, nay, the mere pimp and pander of Elizabethan England, of the France of the Valois, of the Spain of Velasquez, were dignity, purity, courage in person beside the Cad of this breaking dawn of the twentieth century; the Cad rushing on with his shrill scream of laughter as he knocks down the feeble woman or the yearling child, and making life and death and all eternity seem ridiculous by the mere existence of his own intolerable fatuity and bestiality.