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THE MODERN SLAVE-NATURE
Copyright, 1913.
Until our day all the work of the world has been done pain
fully by men, miserable slaves attached to the soil, stunted by
labor, bodies merely fed and worked, and then worked and fed
again, and at last put away in a shallow grave dug by some other
working body.
Where a hundred men, getting in each other’s way, bending
their backs and wearing themselves out, would have worked
throughout an entire day with picks and shovels, ONE MAN now
sits in a big steam shovel slave, directs the work of the monster
with a slight movement of his hand, and in a minute pulls up from
the earth’s depth into the wagon huge rocks that men could not
lift. Every minute this monster does a day’s work of half a dozen
men. And no one suffers, no one is tired, no one is driven—science
that found men slaves of each other and afraid of nature is set
ting men free, free of slavery, free of superstition and terror—
AND MAKING NATURE AND HER POWERS SLAVES OF
MAN.
That is the great accomplishment and glory of this age.
Man uses nature’s forces and conquers nature. Only a short
time ago nature’s forces frightened man.
Civilization must progress in the years ahead of us with a
rapidity inconceivable. FOR THE MINDS AND THE BODIES
OF MEN ARE SET FREE TO THINK.
While men were physical slaves real thought was impossible,
except to the rare min.
Athens was the intellectual center of the world twenty-five
centuries ago, because Athenians employed slaves in great num
bers. Every Athenian citizen learned to think because he had
leisure. The citizens thought and developed a national intellect
that no nation of our day pretends to equal. The greatest Greek
thinker, Aristotle, said that civilization and progress could not
exist without slavery—and he was right.
But he did not dream that men one day would use the giant
slave of steel and steam.
This century and centuries to follow will surpass the Atheni
ans in intelligence and in the possession of slaves.
Our slaves will be of metal, without nerves. The power of
the lightning, of steam, of the tides and of the great sun itself
will be the power of these slaves of civilization.
Slave women spun and wove slowly the clothing of the
Athenians and the Romans.
Our clothing is made by slave fingers of steel. Great ma
chines, gigantic looms, turn out in a day enough to clothe every
citizen of Athens.
The slaves carried their masters in palanquins in Roman
days. Steam and the lightning are the slaves that carry us to
day.
Huge fair-skinned captives from Gaul and Germany did the
digging twenty centuries ago.
Go to the great steel mill at Gary, in Indiana, and there
you see in wonderful perfection man’s use of Nature as his slave.
The great ships bring the ore down the lakes. No man’s
hand has touched it. Jaws of steel have torn it from the ore
bed and dropped it into the ships.
At Gary other steel jaws lift it and carry it to the furnaces.
It is melted and great machines pour it out. It is divided
into huge ingots, and these, white hot, are carried to the first
part of the rolling mill. Still no man’s hand has touched that
iron. No slave has toiled under its weight.
The ingot is squeezed by one machine, made longer and nar
rower, squeezed again and made still longer and narrower.
It starts on its journey along the rollers of the mill, squeezed,
pressed, handled, turned over, and shaped as it travels hundreds
of yards—no hand touching it.
It arrive? at last, a red-hot steel rail, the right shape, cut the
right length. Machinery turns it over, slides it on an incline. It
has made the journey, changing from a shapeless ingot to a fin
ished rail, handled by machinery, the machines guided and con
trolled by one or two mechanics sitting aloft, pressing levers or
buttons, AND WATCHING.
Finished at last and almost ready, the rail slides down the
incline, and for the first time a man deals with it. He is a young
Scandinavian giant, six and a half feet tall, with yellow hair and
a clear gray eye. With huge pincers he turns the rail, and, stand
ing at one end, runs his eye along it. He is no slave, but a well-
paid worker. Ten dollars a day is his pay for the use of that true
eye. As he looks along the rail he sees the defects, moves the left
or the right hand, and another man controlling the straightening
machine straightens the rail as ordered.
And there you have side by side ten rails perfectly straight,
and more always coming down the incline to meet the glance of
that gray eye.
A man sitting in his little tower touches a button, and along
overhead rails there comes gliding a great electric magnet—on a
giant scale—the same as the magnet with which you used to draw
little tin ducks across the water.
The magnet slides along, drops down upon the ten rails that
weigh thousands of pounds, the electrician presses a button,
turns on the current, and man’s electric slave glues the rails to
the magnet. The ten are lifted at once, as easily as a child would
lift a pin; they are carried to a flat car, lowered on the car, the
current is turned off, releasing the rails, and the magnet travels
back to get another load.
To realize what progress the human race has made, remem
ber that the race lived for more than two thousand centuries not
knowing how to use iron, and then see that giant magnet at Gary
loading a car with steel rails, brought from an ore bed one thou
sand miles away, changed from the ore into the finished rail,
AND NEVER TOUCHED BY A MAN’S HAND EXCEPT AS
THE MAN WITH THE CLEAR EYE TURNED THE RAIL
AND ORDERED THE MACHINE TO STRAIGHTEN IT.
There is SLAVERY, and the ideal slavery that will free the
whole human race, by making Nature’s power MAN’S SLAVE.
SPEECH AND THOUGHT MAKE OUR LIVES
Copyright, 1913.
We human beings ceased to be animals and became MEN
when we first used thought in place of brute strength.
At some distant day in our development the animal that
preceded us here made up its feeble mind that there was some
thing better than strength, teeth and claws, and began to use
its little brain.
This animal, our ancestor, the so-called pithecanthropos, or
monkey-man, observed the saber-toothed tiger ripping open the
stomach of a monster three times its size, watched the mammoth
ploughing through swamps, crushing down trees, observed the
great reptiles and all other proofs of brute force, and, without
realizing it, this ancestor said vaguely to himself :
“I can’t compete when it comes to teeth and claws, weight
and bulk. I am a feeble thing in this jumble of power and bat
tle. I must THINK the way out.”
And so our real human life began.
Our ancestor with a forehead one-quarter of an inch high,
a jaw that stuck out as far as the jaw of a gorilla, with teeth
bigger than any of those of any bulldog, and with long arms
dropping below the knees, that could crush a man of to-day with
ease—this old ancestor of ours decided that he would get out of
the battle for supremacy of muscle and teeth and see what could
be done with the brain AKD WITH THINKING.
You can imagine how the thinking process started.
It was hardly real thought at first, just a kind of intelligent
impulse. Our ancestor sat up in a tree rubbing his nose and
looking at the saber-toothed tiger that couldn’t climb.
He saw the shining teeth, six inches long perhaps, and he
didn’t like the looks of them.
Later, when the tiger was gone, he climbed down and picked
up a sharp flint, ten inches long, heavier, sharper and harder
than the tiger’s tooth.
He held this in his hand, struck his brother with it, killed
the brother, and felt highly satisfied with his intellectual accom
plishment.
He had discovered that a tooth made of stone, held at the
end of an arm four feet long, could do as much damage as the
tooth of a tiger.
So he fastened his sharp flint to the end of a piece of wood,
sat in the tree, stabbed the tiger in the back as he passed, broke
his backbone, ate bis flesh, took the teeth to make implements
and ornaments for himself—and so began the thinking human
race.
Later man used explosive dynamite shells in place of sharp
flints, he dwelt in skyscrapers in place of holes in the rocks, he
used flying machines in place of canoes dug out of a log.
BUT ALL THE TIME HE WAS A THINKING ANIMAL
INSTEAD OF AN ANIMAL RELYING ON STRENGTH,
TEETH, MUSCLE, THICK HIDE, CLAWS.
And every step that he gained in his upward climb toward
control of the earth and dominion over the animals was gained
by the THOUGHT that was started when he made up his mind
to use the sharp flint and conquer the long white tooth.
All of this leads to the thinking man, sitting on the ash
barrel in the picture at the top of this page.
He is a descendant of all the thinkers of three hundred
thousand years past.
He comes in an unbroken line from the old half monkey,
half thinking creature that discovered the possibility of con
quering animals stronger than himself.
And this thinker on the ash barrel in poverty, in anxiety, in
remorse, is unfortunately the type of many of those—more than
half, probably—who represent the so-called “civilization and
marvels of achievement.”
This picture is a copy, simply made, of Rodin’s great statue,
“Le Penseur.”
In his statue of thought Rodin shows the man of power
seated on the rock solving his problems by thought.
In the picture that we print on this page the artist shows
the man of sorrow and of weakness, pitifully trying to use for
his betterment and for his defense the power which has been
man’s only weapon.
Readers, whether yon be old or young, realize NOW that
your salvation, your hope, your chances in life, are all in the
thinking power hidden away in your head.
How much will you use that power of thought?
How long are you going to wait to use it efficiently?
To what extent can you make thought, recently acquired by
men, control the animal forces and passions that date back mil
lions of years to our earliest ancestors of the days when this
earth was young?
Are you going to use your power, your health, your clear
mind, and your will NOW to solve your problems and protect
yourself, and be a benefit to the human race, or are you to wait,
and waste, and wonder, and delay, until it is too late, as with
this man?