City Life: A Poem Illustrating Why Mini-Factories are Critical

In my studies I recently encountered the following poem by D.H. Lawrence. The poem leaped from the pages as an intense promotion of the “organic decentralization” Oliver DeMille says is vital in The Coming Aristocracy.

City Life

When I am in a great city, I know that I despair.
I know there is no hope for us, death waits, it is useless to care.

For oh the poor people, that are flesh of my flesh,
I that am flesh of their flesh,
when I see the iron hooked into their faces
their poor, their fearful faces
I scream in my soul, for I know I cannot
take the iron hooks out of their faces, that make them so drawn,

nor cut the invisible wires of steel that pull them
back and forth, to work,
back and forth to work,
like fearful and corpse-like fishes hooked and being played
by some malignant fisherman on an unseen shore
where he does not care to land them yet, hooked fishes of
the factory world.

Mini-factories are the answer to and redemption of that haunting 20th Century description of city and factory life. As Oliver DeMille states:

“Imagine the impact on everything in our lives if each family could provide all, or even many, of its needs for itself — and do it better than kings or politicians ruling over working peasants or even corporations employing workers to produce goods and services. Such is the world of the mini-factory.”

“…the impetus of the mini-factory trend is freedom. People want to spend less time at the factory/corporation and more time at home. They want to be more involved in raising their children and improving their love life. In an aristocracy, these luxuries are reserved for the upper class. In a free society, anyone can build a mini-factory.”

*If that poem resonates with you, you’ll also enjoy this parable from Richard Bach I wrote about in a previous post.

Mini-factories embody our core values, bring our passions to life, and move the cause of liberty by making us less dependent on bureaucratic, aristocratic institutions.

Instead, they help us turn to God and our inner resources for answers, strength, and fortitude.

They make us come alive as we shed mediocrity, complacence and dependence and grapple with life’s challenges as free men and women committed to personal responsibility and integrity. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:

“One of the happiest consequences of the absence of government is the development of individual strength that inevitably follows from it. Each man learns to think, to act for himself, without counting on the support of an outside force which, however vigilant one supposes it to be, can never answer all social needs.

“Man, thus accustomed to seek his well-being only through his own efforts, raises himself in his own opinion as he does in the opinion of others; his soul becomes larger and stronger at the same time.”