[74] "Hold fast, Aunt Annie! Hold fast, Uncle Piet!" practically meaning, "Stand where you are and hold your ground."
"Oom and Tante, I will whisper to you a secret! Here, in the very heart of this great material civilization of ours which swells itself so bravely and makes so much noise--here, in the heart of it, there are some of us men and women who are beginning to have our doubts of it; we are beginning to find it out. We may not be very many now, but we shall be more by and by; and we are beginning to question what all this vast accumulation of material goods in certain hands, this enormous increase in the complexity of the material conditions of life, necessarily leads to?
"We ask ourselves this:--Though we increase endlessly the complexity of our material possessions and our desires, does the human creature who desires and possesses necessarily expand with them? And the answer which comes back to us when we deeply consider this question is: No.
"There are times, when, looking carefully at this nineteenth-century civilization of ours, it appears to us much like that concretion which certain deep-sea creatures build up about themselves out of the sand and rubbish on the deep-sea floor, which after a time becomes hard and solid, and forms their grave. It appears to us that under this vast accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and more complex material conditions of life, the human spirit and even the human body are being crushed; that the living creature is building up about itself a tomb, in which it will finally dwindle and die.
"We vary endlessly the nature and shape of the garments we wear; but the bodies for which they exist do not grow more powerful or agile; we multiply endlessly the complexity of our foods; but our digestions grow no stronger to deal with them; we build our houses larger and larger, but the span of life for inhabiting them grows no longer: the Bedouin of the Desert inhabits his tent as long: our cities grow vaster and vaster, but our enjoyment of life in them becomes no more intense: our states expand, but the vitality of their component parts rises no higher: we rush from end to end of the earth with the speed of lightning, but we love it no better than men who lived in their valley and went no further than their feet would carry them: we put the whole world under contribution to supply our physical needs, but the breath of life is no sweeter to us than to our forefathers whom the products of one land could satisfy.