it is true; every new invention makes things more complicated and
perplexing. These new automatic telephones, which are said to make
the business of getting a number so easy, will mean (we suppose)
that we will be called up fifty times a day--instead of (as now) a
mere twenty or thirty, while we are swooning and swinking over a
sonnet. But more and more people are taking to commuting and we look
to that to save things.

Because commuting is a tough and gruelling discipline. It educes
all the latent strength and virtue in a man (although it is hard on
those at home, for when he wins back at supper time there is left in
him very little of what the ladies so quaintly call "soul"). If you
study the demeanour of fellow-passengers on the 8:04 and the 5:27
you will see a quiet and well-drilled acceptiveness, a pious
non-resistance, which is not unworthy of the antique Chinese sages.

Is there any ritual (we cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue
the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and
seasoned qualities of manhood? It is well known that the fiercest
and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been
commuters. It was a Division composed chiefly of commuters that
stormed the Hindenburg Stellung and purged the Argonne thickets with
flame and steel. Their commanding officers were wont to remark these
men's carelessness of life. It seemed as though they hardly heeded
whether they got home again or not.

See them as they stand mobbed at the train gate, waiting for
admission to the homeward cars. A certain disingenuous casualness
appears on those hardened brows; but beneath burn stubborn fires.
These are engaged in battle, and they know it--a battle that never