Then He Perceives
How Good For The Breed It Must Be That A Man Should Thresh Himself To
Pieces In Naked Competition With His Neighbour While His Wife Struggles
Unceasingly Over Primitive Savagery In The Kitchen.
In India sometimes
when a famine is at hand the life of the land starts up before your eyes
in all its bareness and bitter stress.
Here, in spite of the trimmings
and the frillings, it refuses to be subdued and the clamour and the
clatter of it are loud above all other sounds - as sometimes the thunder
of disorganised engines stops conversations along the decks of a liner,
and in the inquiring eyes of the passengers you read the question - 'This
thing is made and paid to bear us to port quietly. Why does it not do
so?' Only here, the rattle of the badly-put-together machine is always
in the ears, though men and women run about with labour-saving
appliances and gospels of 'power through repose,' tinkering and oiling
and making more noise. The machine is new. Some day it is going to be
the finest machine in the world. To the ranks of the amateur artificers,
therefore, are added men with notebooks tapping at every nut and
bolthead, fiddling with the glands, registering revolutions, and crying
out from time to time that this or that is or is not 'distinctively
American.' Meantime, men and women die unnecessarily in the wheels, and
they are said to have fallen 'in the battle of life.'
The God Who sees us all die knows that there is far too much of that
battle, but we do not, and so continue worshipping the knife that cuts
and the wheel that breaks us, as blindly as the outcast sweeper worships
Lal-Beg the Glorified Broom that is the incarnation of his craft.
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