armament again played to a finish in popular squalor, aristocratic virtues, and universal bankruptcy, there will be no peaceable community of matter-of-fact mechanics and shopkeepers left in reserve from which to make a new cultural and industrial start. The modem technology has, in a manner, cut away the ground out of which it first grew and from which it gathered force to reshape the course of history. It has made it impossible j for any community to stand peaceably outside of . the great complex of nations.
But within the comprehensive situation of to-day there is this new factor, the machine process. In an earlier chapter (IT.) the technological character of this machine process has been set forth at some length. The machine process pervades the modem life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustment and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to standard units. The bearing of this sweeping mechanical standardization upon business traffic is a large part of the subject-matter of the foregoing ^[chapters. The point of immediate interest uere is jithe further bearing of the machine process upon |,the growth of culture, — the disciplinary effect which this movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence has upon the human material.
CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 307
This discipline falls more Immediately on the workmen engaged in the mechanical industries, and only less immediately on the rest of the community which lives in contact with this sweeping machine process.