Aging & Wisdom Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Balch’s sentence refuses the comforting story that the machine is the whole plot. By calling industrialization “but one aspect,” she demotes the factory floor from star to supporting actor, insisting the real upheaval is broader, slipperier, and harder to regulate: “technology” as a force that rewires economies, politics, and daily habits all at once. The phrasing “already referred to as a characteristic of our age” carries a faint impatience with conventional wisdom, as if she’s nudging her readers past the era’s favorite shorthand. Yes, machines are loud and visible. The deeper revolution is infrastructural.

The intent is diagnostic, but also strategic. Balch, an educator and public thinker writing in the shadow of rapid mechanization, mass production, and the social disruptions that followed, is arguing for conceptual clarity: if you mistake industrialization for the full transformation, you’ll aim your reforms at the wrong target. Labor conditions, wages, and factory regulation matter, but they won’t capture what happens when technology reorganizes time (standardized schedules), space (urbanization and mobility), information (new media and bureaucracy), and power (larger institutions with larger reach).

The subtext is a warning about scale. “Revolution” here isn’t romantic; it’s systemic. Balch implies that technology’s consequences won’t stay politely in the economic lane. They will spill into education, war-making capacity, domestic life, and civic expectations. Read now, her line feels uncannily contemporary: our fixation on the most visible gadget can obscure the quieter redesign of society happening underneath it.