N one and the same day, recently,

a Chicago tailor suddenly pushed his sewing-machine through a seventhstory window, the Saturday sales of a certain South Sea island novel broke all records in a Boston book-store, and three hundred patriots in British India danced around a blazing pile of British night-shirts.

Those three scraps of information take on a certain family resemblance when you think them over. Here they are, quite unlike one another, hailing from three distant quarters; and yet they have a certain harmony. The Indian patriots burned their British night-shirts, as our grandfathers dumped their British tea, because they were up in arms against Western politics and, more generally, Western economics. The Chicago tailor quite unpredictably found himself incapable of stitching for the twenty-thousandth time two more straight rows of trousers-seams, and had his faithful little engine clattering through the window even before he thought what he was doing, as instinctively as a seasick traveler will brush away a tray of steaming food. As for the South Sea island novel that sold so well in Boston, and sells so well in any other city, that was presumably because it invites an imaginative escape from routine into romance. Who can doubt it?

The common enemy in all three cases was our own machine age. And though there is not much to be argued from the flight into the night of one Chicago tailor, it is evident that in certain quarters the machine age must begin to reckon with deserters. Sometimes the warning of that fact is a lone bolt for freedom, sometimes the heavy tread of patriots in war regalia; sometimes the purely reflex action of "too much machine age" during war-days, sometimes more like the rolling up of an implacable resentment that has been gathering force for two decades. A school of prophets, ever more assured, hails the coming of a new revolt. They call it the revolt against modern industrial civilization, the revolt against the domination of machinery.

And they point, first, to the evidence of revolt in that least explosive of all circles-the small family cluster headed by the "tired business man." Who has not heard this captain of the modern era grumble about life's changeless pace? Work brings the same routine, day in, day out; the same 8:12 suburban local in the morning, same office work till lunch, same 5:20 local home again at night. "Got to get away from this. Ought to have a week in Maine." Look at the energy spent in pacifying him! Hundreds of thousands of men and women mak