The Fifth Crusade
THE FIFTH CRUSADE THE advantages of the census, as pointed out by Mr. Lamont, Secretary of Commerce, we do not question, and certainly we are awaiting the results with impatience. Considering...
...It has brought only to some of us such ease of living as the ancients never dreamed of, but with this removal : of the natural disciplines of life perhaps there has come a need for the distinct and deliberate effort of the will if we are to retain dignity and independence as human beings...
...Much more recently Eugene O'Neill, indicating the cults which might arise in the future, wrote a play about a man who worshiped a dynamo...
...Probably if our legs should painlessly wither tomorrow the consequence to the nation would not be so disastrous as if we should scrap all automobiles, built, building, and planned, and the raspberry bush should reclaim the vast domains of Ford...
...There is need for the preaching of a Fifth Crusade...
...whereever he journeyed the fruits of the earth were ready to his hand, and if his thirst was as Noah's, there was wine for the poor in the halls of all great barons...
...Absurd as all this may sound, it is meant as an echo of something which has been worrying the more acute observers of emotional undercurrents in our industrialized age...
...More effective reminders surround us every wakeful moment...
...Once the census was as good as a sermon, better than most...
...We shall expect from it a proper service, without ever using it to impress men in a servitude wherein they are unable to help themselves, and possess • more confidence in a machine than in their own talent...
...And there are plenty of signs that the effort is not being made...
...We cannot press the point, but it may be that more able, and better-equipped observers would discover that our attitude toward machinery is as primitive as this, and as devoid of sophistication...
...Of course when finding fault with the present it is always hard to keep from insinuating regrets for the fabulous days when a man could say with literal intent, "The Lord is my keeper, I shall not want," for when : a hunger not of the spirit assailed his vitals, there could be found bread and meat at a monastery door...
...But while the benefits of the census in some ways are greater than they have ever been before—particularly in this year when statistics are seen as the only hope of stabilizing business which sorely needs stability—other advantages which formerly adhered to it have disappeared...
...And Mr...
...But what we need now is something else entirely...
...And, if we interpret Dr...
...The machines which charge madly at every man who presumes to walk the streets are simply demonstrating the obvious fact that legs are no longer so important as wheels...
...i This is not only simply a lament for the good old times...
...Painting the Indians a hundred years ago, George Catlin found that many chiefs were reluctant to pose, on the opinion that life passed from themselves to the canvas...
...At times it would seem that our acceptance of the machine has been entirely too simple and complete...
...not a loss of pride but an increase of dignity...
...We refer to its spiritual effects...
...From my talks with ordinary workers I get the impression that they feel dwarfed, not by capitalism, but by large-scaled machinery...
...From the first we have made use of it without much thought to the necessity for holding fast to the spiritual values inherent in an order which it has destroyed...
...Years ago Henry Adams was embarrassed upon contemplating the newer manifestations of progress in electrical science...
...But it seems to us that despite all we may learn about the discomforts of living in times past, the present itself is no grand golden age...
...Considering the utility to which we can put the information it gathers, it ought to be the most important news of 1930...
...It must have been salutary to be reminded occasionally of our individual negligibility, of the fact that from the viewpoint of the nation we existed only as ciphers...
...Burns's workmen are not so greatly different from the savages who feel that the apparent life in any man-made wonder exists at a diminution of vitality in themselves...
...C. Delisle Burns writes: "The tool has become alive...
...James J. Walsh correctly, it is for this reason he salutes the discovery of the new planet in the able paper which graces this issue of The Commonweal...
...To the machines which most sharply differentiate this age from any other we are subservient, and to such an extent that since we have made them almost like men it is in some places taken for granted that the only work left us is to make men like machines...
...Life was never so simple as that...
...Indeed we do not need the census to remind us of humility...
...It will declare that the machine is the necessary work of our hands, but since we have made it, we shall despise it, at least not venerate it as a live thing...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
