The
commonest of representative men. I went about that Westphalian
country after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless,
blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all about me. I felt
that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black
dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks
are hooded. . . . And I had never thought very much about them
before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that
frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a
million, saw fit to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and
nationalism and faction. . . ."
Then came a queer fancy.
"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see
it more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for
the happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an
enormous plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in
particular half-living people seem to love these things.
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