The Themes of Muckraking

There is in America today a distinct prejudice in favor of those who make the accusations. Thus if you announced that John D. Rockefeller was going to vote the Republican ticket it would be regarded at once as a triumph for the Democrats. Something has happened to our notions of success: no political party these days enjoys publishing the names of its campaign contributors, if those names belong to the pillars of society. The mere statement that George W. Perkins is an active Progressive has put the whole party somewhat on the defensive. And there is more than sarcasm in the statement of the New York Times Annalist that:
'If it be true that the less bankers have to do with a scheme of banking and currency reform the more acceptable it will be to the people, it follows that the Administration's Currency Bill ...must command popular admiration.’

You have only to write an article about some piece of corruption in order to find yourself the target of innumerable correspondents, urging you to publish their wrongs. The sense of conspiracy and secret scheming which transpire is almost uncanny. 'Big Business,’ and its ruthless tentacles, have become the material for the feverish fantasy of illiterate thousands thrown out of kilter by the rack and strain of modern life. It is possible to work yourself into a state where the world seems a conspiracy and your daily going is beset with an alert and tingling sense of labyrinthine evil. Everything askew—all the frictions of life are readily ascribed to a deliberate evil intelligence, and men like Morgan and Rockefeller take on attributes of omnipotence, that ten minutes of cold sanity would reduce to a barbarous myth. I know a socialist who seriously believes that the study of eugenics is a Wall Street scheme for sterilizing working-class leaders. And the cartoons which pictured Morgan sitting arrogantly in a chariot drawn by the American people in a harness of ticker tape, — these are not so much caricatures as pictures of what no end of fairly sane people believe. Not once but twenty times have I been told confidentially of a nation-wide scheme by financiers to suppress every radical and progressive periodical. But even though the most intelligent muckrakers have always insisted that the picture was absurd, it remains to this day a very widespread belief. I remember how often Lincoln Steffens used to deplore the frightened literalness with which some of his articles were taken. One day in the country he and I were walking the railroad track. The ties, of course, are not well spaced for an ordinary stride, and I complained about it. 'You see,’ said Mr. Steffens with mock obviousness, 'Morgan controls the New Haven and he prefers to make the people ride.’

Now it is not very illuminating to say that this smear of suspicion has been worked up by the muckrakers. If business and politics really served American need, you could never induce people to believe so many accusations against them. It is said, also, that the muckrakers played for circulation, as if that proved their insincerity. But the mere fact that muckraking was what people wanted to hear is in many ways the most important revelation of the whole campaign.

There is no other way of explaining the quick approval which the muckrakers won. They weren't voices crying in a wilderness, or lonely prophets who were stoned. They demanded a hearing; it was granted. They asked for belief; they were believed. They cried that something should be done and there was every appearance of action. There must have been real causes for dissatisfaction, or the land notorious for its worship of success would not have turned so savagely upon those who had achieved it. A happy husband will endure almost anything, but an unhappy one is capable of flying into a rage if his carpet-slippers are not in the right place. For America, the willingness to believe the worst was a strange development in the face of its traditional optimism, a sign perhaps that the honeymoon was over. For muckraking flared up at about the time when land was no longer freely available and large scale industry had begun to throw vast questions across the horizon. It came when success had ceased to be easily possible for everyone.

The muckrakers spoke to a public willing to recognize as corrupt an incredibly varied assortment of conventional acts. That is why there is nothing mysterious or romantic about the business of exposure, — no putting on of false hair, breaking into letter-files at midnight, hypnotizing financiers, or listening at keyholes. The stories of graft, written and unwritten, are literally innumerable. Often muckraking consists merely in dressing up a public document with rhetoric and pictures, translating a court record into journalese, or writing the complaints of a minority stockholder, a dislodged politician, or a boss gone 'soft.’ No journalist need suffer from a want of material.

Now in writing this chapter I started out to visualize this material in systematic and scholarly fashion by making a list of the graft revelations in the last ten years. I wished for some quantitative sense of the number and kinds of act that are called corrupt. But I found myself trying to classify the industrial, financial, political, foreign and social relations of the United States, with hundreds of sub-heads, and a thousand gradations of credibility and exaggeration. It was an impossible task. The popular press of America is enormous, and for years it has been filled with 'probes’ and 'amazing revelations.’ And how is a person to classify, say, the impeachment of a Tammany governor by a Tammany legislature? A mere list of investigations would fill this book, and I abandoned the attempt with the mental reservation that if anyone really desired that kind of proof, a few German scholars, young and in perfect health, should be imported to furnish it.

They could draw up a picture to stagger even a jaded American. Suppose they began their encyclopedia with the adulteration of foods. There would follow a neat little volume on the aliases of coffee. The story of meat would help the vegetarians till the volume on canned foods appeared. Milk would curdle the blood, bread and butter would raise a scandal, candy, —the volume would have to be suppressed. If photographs could convey odors the study of restaurants might be done without words. The account of patent medicines, quack doctors, beauty parlors, mining schemes, loan sharks, shyster lawyers, all this riff-raff and fraud in the cesspool of commercialism would make unendurable reading. You would rush to the window, cursing the German pedants, grateful for a breath of that air which filters through in spite of the unenforced smoke ordinance of your city.

But the story would proceed. Think of your state of mind after you had read all about the methods of drummers, advertising agents, lobbyists, publicity men, after you knew adulteration of every description, and had learned the actual motives and history of political conferences, of caucuses, and consultations with the boss; suppose you understood the underground history of legislatures, the miscarriages of justice, the relations of the police to vice and crime, of newspapers to advertisers and wealthy citizens, of trade union leaders to their unions, the whole fetid story of the war between manufacturers and labor organizations. A study of the public domain in America would employ a staff of investigators. What railroads have done to the public, to their employees, what directors do to the stockholders and the property, the quantitative record of broken trust, the relation of bankers to the prosperity of business enterprise, of stock gamblers to capitalization, —taking merely all that is known and could be illustrated, summed up and seen at once, what a picture it would make.

And yet such a picture would be false and inept. For certainly there must be some ground for this sudden outburst of candor, some ground beside a national desire for abstract truth and righteousness. These charges and counter-charges arose because the world has been altered radically, not because Americans fell in love with honesty. If we condemn what we once honored, if we brand as criminal the conventional acts of twenty years ago, it's because we have developed new necessities and new expectations.

They are the clue to the clouds of accusation which hang over American life. You cannot go very far by reiterating that public officials are corrupt, that business men break the law. The unbribed official and the law-abiding business man are not ideals that will hold the imagination very long. And that is why the earlier kind of muckraking exhausted itself. There came a time when the search for not-dishonest men ceased to be interesting. We all know now what tepid failures were those first opponents of corruption, the men whose only claim to distinction was that they had done no legal wrong. For without a vivid sense of what politics and business might be, you cannot wage a very fruitful campaign.

Now if you study the chief themes of muckraking I think it is possible to see the outlines of what America has come to expect.

The first wave of exposure insisted upon the dishonesty of politicians. Close upon it came widespread attack upon big business men, who were charged with bribing officials and ruining their competitors. Soon another theme appeared: big business men were accused of grafting upon the big corporations which they controlled. We are entering upon another period now; not alone big lousiness, but all business and farming too, are being criticized for inefficiency, for poor product, and for exploitation of employees.

This classification is, of course, a very rough one. It would be easy enough to dispute it, for the details are endlessly complicated and the exceptions may appear very large to some people. But I think, nevertheless, that this classification does no essential violence to the facts. It doesn't matter for my purposes that some communities are still in what I call the first period, while others are in the third. For a nation like ours doesn't advance at the same rate everywhere. All I mean to suggest is that popular muckraking in the last decade has shifted its interest in something like this order: First, to the corruption of aldermen and mayors and public servants by the boss acting for a commercial interest, and to the business methods of those who built up the trusts. Then, muckraking turned, and began to talk about the milking of railroads by banks, and of one corporation by another. This period laid great emphasis on the 'interlocking directorate.’ Now, muckraking is fastening upon the waste in management, upon working conditions as in the Steel Mills or at Lawrence, or upon the quality of service rendered by the larger corporations. These have been the big themes.

Why should they have been? Why, to begin with, should politicians have been attacked so fiercely? Some people would say flatly: because politicians were dishonest. Yet that is an utterly unfounded generalization. The morals of politicians cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as exceptionally bad. Politicians were on the make. To be sure. But who in this sunny land isn't? They gave their relatives and friends pleasant positions. What father doesn't do that for his son if he can, and with every feeling of righteousness? They helped their friends, they were loyal to those who had helped them: who will say that in private life these are not admirable virtues? And what were the typical grafts in politics? the grafts for which we tried to send politicians to jail? The city contracts for work, and the public official is in league with the contractor; but railroads also contract for work, and corporation officials are at least as frequently as politicians, financially interested in the wrong side of the deal. The city buys real estate, and the city official manages to buy it from himself or his friends. But railroad directors have been known to sell their property to the road they govern.

We can see, I think, what people meant by the word graft. They did not mean robbery. It is rather confused rhetoric to call a grafter a thief. His crime is not that he filches money from the safe but that he betrays a trust. The grafter is a man whose loyalty is divided and whose motives are mixed. A lawyer who takes a fee from both sides in some case; a public official who serves a private interest; a railroad director who is also a director in the supply company; a policeman in league with outlawed vice: those are the relationships which the American people denounce as 'corrupt.’ The attempt to serve at the same time two antagonistic interests is what constitutes 'corruption.’

The crime is serious in proportion to the degree of loyalty that we expect. A President of the United States who showed himself too friendly to some private interest would be denounced, though he may not have made one cent out of the friendship. But where we have not yet come to expect much loyalty we do very little muckraking. So if you inquired into the ethics of the buyer in almost any manufacturing house, you would find him doing things daily that would land the purchasing agent of a city in jail. Who regards it as especially corrupt if the selling firm 'treats’ the buyer, gives him or her a 'present,’ perhaps a commission, or at least a 'good time’? American life is saturated with the very relationship which in politics we call corrupt. The demand for a rake-off penetrates to the kitchen where a sophisticated cook expects a commission from the butcher, and tampers with the meat if it is refused; you can find it in the garage where the chauffeur has an understanding about the purchase of supplies; it extends to the golf caddie who regards a 'lost’ ball as his property and proceeds to sell it to the next man for half the original cost, ? it extends to the man who buys that ball; and it ramifies into the professions when doctors receive commissions from specialists for sending patients to them; it saturates the work-a-day world with tips and fees and 'putting you on to a good thing’ and 'letting you in on the ground floor.’ But in the politician it is mercilessly condemned.

That is because we expect more of the politician. We say in effect that no public servant must allow himself to follow the economic habits of his countrymen. The corrupt politician is he who brings into public service the traditions of a private career. Perhaps that is a cynical reflection. I do not know how to alter it. When I hear politicians talk 'reform,’ I know they are advocating something which most drummers on the road would regard as the scruples of a prig, and I know that when business men in a smoking-room are frank, they are taking for granted acts which in a politician we should call criminal.

For the average American will condemn in an alderman what in his partner he would consider reason for opening a bottle of champagne. In literal truth the politician is attacked for displaying the morality of his constituents. You might if you didn't understand the current revolution, consider that hypocrisy. It isn't: it is one of the hopeful signs of' the age. For it means that unconsciously men regard some of the interests of life as too important for the intrusion of commercial ethics.

Run a government today, with the same motives and vision that you run a dry goods store, and watch for the activity of the muckrakers. Pursue in the post office the methods which made you a founder of colleges, you will be grateful for a kind word from Mr. Lorimer? Poor as they are, the standards of public life are so much more social than those of business that financiers who enter politics regard themselves as philanthropists. The amount of work and worry without reward is almost beyond the comprehension of the man whose every act is measured in profit and loss. The money to be accumulated in politics even by the cynically corrupt is so small by comparison that able men on the make go into politics only when their motives are mixed with ambition, a touch of idealism, vanity, or an imaginative notion of success.

But the fact that a public official took no bribe soon ceased to shield him from popular attack. Between the honest adherent of machine politics and the corruptionist himself the muckrakers made no sharp distinction. And that was because they had in a vague way come to expect positive action from men in office. They looked for better school systems, or health campaigns, or a conservation policy, that is for fairly concrete social measures, and officials who weren't for them were lumped together and denounced. The official might have read too much Adam Smith, or been too much of a lawyer, or taken orders from the boss, or a bribe from a lobbyist? the rough result was the same: he wasn't for what public opinion had come to expect, and the muckrakers laid their traps for him.

I suppose that from the beginning of the republic people had always expected their officials to work at a level less self-seeking than that of ordinary life. So that corruption in politics could never be carried on with an entirely good conscience. But at the opening of this century, democratic people had begun to see much greater possibilities in the government than ever before. They looked to it as a protector from economic tyranny and as the dispenser of the prime institutions of democratic life.

But when they went to the government, what they found was a petty and partisan, slavish and blind, clumsy and rusty instrument for their expectations. That added to the violence of their attacks. When they had no vision of what a democratic state might do, it didn't make so very much difference if officials took a rake-off. The cost of corruption was only a little money, and perhaps the official's immortal soul. But when men's vision of government enlarged, then the cost of corruption and inefficiency rose: for they meant a blighting of the whole possibility of the state. There has always been corruption in American politics, but it didn't worry people very much, so long as the sphere of government was narrowly limited. Corruption became a real problem when reform through state action began to take hold of men's thought.

As muckraking developed, it began to apply the standards of public life to certain parts of the business world. Naturally the so-called public service corporation was the first to feel the pressure. There is obviously a great difference in outlook between the Vanderbilt policy of 'the public be damned’ and the McAdoo policy of 'the public be pleased.'' The old sense of private property is very much modified: few railroad men today would deny that they are conducting a quasi-public enterprise, and that something more is demanded of them than private exploitation. Thus President Mellen of the New Haven railroad could not have been handled more roughly by the people of New England if they had elected him to office? And his successor, President Howard Elliott, finds it necessary to remind the people that 'the railroad is a public servant in fact as well as in name and that the service which it renders depends largely upon the treatment which it receives from its master.’ Mr. Elloit’s grandfather would, I think, have said that his descendant lacked a sense of private property. That is true: Mr. Elliott's remark is a recognition that the cultural basis of property is radically altered, however much the law may lag behind in recognizing the change. So if the stockholders think they are the ultimate owners of the Pennsylvania railroad, they are colossally mistaken. Whatever the law may be, the people have no such notion. And the men who are connected with these essential properties cannot escape the fact that they are expected to act increasingly as public officials.

That expectation has filtered into the larger industrial corporations. I have here, for example, a statement by Roger Babson, a recognized financial expert:

'Suppose the mayor of a town should appoint his brother police commissioner; his daughter's husband, fire commissioner; his uncle, superintendent of the water works; and put his son in charge of the street cleaning department. How long would it be before the good citizens would hold an indignation meeting? It would not be long. No city in America would stand that kind of graft. Yet pick up the letterhead of a private corporation and what are you likely to find? It usually reads something like this: Quincy Persimmon, president; Quincy Persimmon, Jr., vice-president; Persimmon Quincy, treasurer; Howard Lemon, secretary. The presence of Howard Lemon in this select family circle is somewhat puzzling until one learns that Prunella Quincy Persimmon is the wife of Howard Lemon. Then all is clear. To be sure, the general manager of the concern, who is the man to see on any matter of special importance, is a man named Hobbs or Smith or Hogan, but it soon appears that the salary of the general manager is just about what it costs young Lemon to run his motor for one year ...Has there ever been an American mayor who dared to run his city as this private corporation is run? In their leisure moments the Persimmons, Quincys and the Lemons are constantly advising their fellow citizens of the danger of permitting an American city to advance one step toward the sort of municipal work which is done by a great many foreign cities with success. The reason against this is given as the graft in public life.’

Now when the Persimmons are muckraked, what puzzles them beyond words is that anyone should presume to meddle with their business. What they will learn is that it is no longer altogether their business. The law may not have realized this, but the fact is being accomplished, and it's a fact grounded deeper than statutes. Big business men who are at all intelligent recognize this. They are talking more and more about their 'responsibilities,’ their 'stewardship.’ It is the swan-song of the old commercial profiteering and a dim recognition that the motives in business are undergoing a revolution.

But muckraking has grown in scope, which is another way of saying that it has come to expect still more. We hear now about the inefficiency of business. Men like Brandeis, Redfield, Taylor have taken the lead in this criticism. Try if you can to imagine a merchant in the '70's subject to criticism on a national scale because he didn't know how to run his business. He would have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of such a suggestion. As a matter of fact some remnants of that age have sputtered and exploded at the impudence of Mr. Brandeis. But in the main the younger business men have been willing to listen. They do not think it a preposterous notion when the Secretary of Commerce suggests that if they are to conduct business they must do it efficiently. Then too, the farmers are being criticized. They are no longer deluged with adulation: they are being told quite frankly that they have a very great deal to learn from the government and the universities. And now there is a tremendous agitation about the quality of the goods and the conditions of labor under which they are produced.

Why all this has happened: why there are new standards for business men, why the nature of property is altered, why the workers and the purchasers are making new demands,? all this muckraking never made very clear. It was itself considerably more of an effect than a sign of leadership. It expressed a change, and consequently it is impossible to say that muckraking was either progressive or reactionary in its tendency. The attack upon business men was listened to by their defeated competitors as well as by those who looked forward to some better order of industrial life. Muckraking is full of the voices of the beaten, of the bewildered, and then again it is shot through with some fine anticipation. It has pointed to a revolution in business motives; it has hinted at the emerging power of labor and the consumer ? we can take those suggestions, perhaps, and by analyzing them, and following them through, gather for ourselves some sense of what moves beneath the troubled surface of events.

New Incentives

We say in conversation: 'Oh, no, he's not a business man, - he has a profession.’ That sounds like an invidious distinction, and no doubt there is a good deal of caste and snobbery in the sentiment. But that isn't all there is.

We imagine that men enter the professions by undergoing a special discipline to develop a personal talent. So their lives seem more interesting, and their incentives more genuine. The business man may feel that the scientist content with a modest salary is an improvident ass. But he also feels some sense of inferiority in the scientist's presence. For at the bottom there is a difference of quality in their lives, ? in the scientist's a dignity which the scramble for profit can never assume. The professions may be shot through with rigidity, intrigue, and hypocrisy: they have, nevertheless, a community of interest, a sense of craftsmanship, and a more permanent place in the larger reaches of the imagination. It is a very pervasive and subtle difference, but sensitive business men are aware of it. They are not entirely proud of their profit-motive: bankers cover it with a sense of importance, others mitigate it with charity and public work, a few dream of railroad empires and wildernesses tamed, and some reveal their sense of unworthiness by shouting with extra emphasis that they are not in business for their health.

It is a sharp commentary on the psychological insight of the orthodox economist who maintains that the only dependable motive is profit. Most people repeat that parrot-fashion, but in the rub they don't act upon it. When we began to hear recently that radium might subdue cancer, there was a fairly unanimous demand that the small supply available should be taken over by the government and removed from the sphere of private exploitation. The fact is that men don't trust the profiteer in a crisis, or wherever the interest at stake is of essential importance. So the public regards a professor on the make as a charlatan, a doctor on the make as a quack, a woman on the make as an adventuress, a politician on the make as a grafter, a writer on the make as a hack, a preacher on the make as a hypocrite. For in science, art, politics, religion, the home, love, education, ? the pure economic motive, profiteering, the incentive of business enterprise is treated as a public peril. Wherever civilization is seen to be in question, the Economic Man of commercial theorists is in disrepute.
I am not speaking in chorus with those sentimentalists who regard industry as sordid. They merely inherit an ancient and parasitic contempt for labor. I do not say for one instant that money is the root of evil, that rich men are less honest than poor, or any equivalent nonsense. I am simply trying to point out that there is in everyday life a widespread rebellion against the profit motive. That rebellion is not an attack on the creation of wealth. It is, on the contrary, a discovery that private commercialism is an antiquated, feeble, mean, and unimaginative way of dealing with the possibilities of modern industry.

The change is, I believe, working itself out under our very eyes. Each day brings innumerable plans for removing activities from the sphere of profit. Endowment, subsidy, state aid, endless varieties of consumers' and producers' cooperatives; public enterprise ? they have been devised to save the theater, to save science and invention, education and journalism, the market basket and public utilities from the life-sapping direction of the commercialist. What is the meaning of these protean efforts to supersede the profiteer if not that his motive produces results hostile to use, and that he is a usurper where the craftsman, the inventor and the industrial statesman should govern? There is no sudden substitution of sacrifice for selfishness. These experiments are being tried because commercialism failed to serve civilization: the cooperator intrenched behind his wiser organization would smile if you regarded him as a patient lamb on the altar of altruism. He knows that the old economists were bad psychologists and superficial observers when they described man as a slot machine set in motion by inserting a coin.

It is often asserted that modern industry could never have been created had it not been given over to untrammeled exploitation by commercial adventurers. That may be true. There is no great point in discussing the question as to what might have happened if something else had happened in the past. Modern industry was created by the profiteer, and here it is, the great fact in our lives, blackening our cities, fed with the lives of children, a tyrant over men and women, turning out enormous stocks of produce, good, bad, and horrible. We need waste no time arguing whether any other motive could have done the work. What we are finding is that however effective profit may have been for inaugurating modern industry, it is failing as a method of realizing its promise. That is why men turned to cooperatives and labor unions; that is why the state is interfering more and more. These blundering efforts are the assertion of all the men and all those elements of their natures which commercialism has thwarted. No amount of argument can wipe out the fact that the profit-system has never commanded the wholehearted assent of the people who lived under it. There has been a continuous effort to overthrow it. From Robert Owen to John Stuart Mill, from Ruskin through Morris to the varied radicalism of our day, from the millionaire with his peace palaces to Henry Ford with his generous profit-sharing, through the consumer organizing a cooperative market, to the workingmen defying their masters and the economists by pooling their labor, you find a deep stream of uneasiness, of human restlessness against those impositions which are supposed to rest on the eternal principles of man's being.

There is scarcely any need to press the point, for no one questions the statement that endowment, cooperation, or public enterprise are attempts to employ motives different from those of the profiteer. The only dispute is whether these new motives can be extended and made effective. It is, I think, a crucial question. It lies at the root of most theoretical objection to socialism in the famous 'human nature’ argument. Far from being a trivial question, as socialist debaters like to pretend, ? it is the hardest nut they have to crack. They are proposing a reconstruction of human society, and in all honesty, they cannot dodge the question as to whether man as we know him is capable of what they ask. Persian, Mexican, Turkish and Chinese experience with constitutional democracies ought to show how easy it is, as Macaulay said, for a tailor to measure the clothes of all his customers by the Apollo Belvedere. In a matter like this there is little to choose between the socialist who is sure his plan will work and the 'anti’ who is sure it will not. The profit-motive is attacked, that is certain; that more or less successful attempts are made to supplant it is obvious, but how far we can go, that remains an open question. We cannot answer it by analogy: it does not follow from the success of a cooperative grocery that the Steel Trust can be governed on the same plan. If our expectations are to have any solidity we must find evidence for them in those great private industries which seem to be completely in the hands of profit. That is where the issues join. The theater has always been a stamping ground for 'queer’ people; scholars are notoriously incompetent in 'business’; scientific research pays so well, is so undeniably valuable, that few dare grudge it a subsidy; public utilities, like the highways, are by tradition not business propositions; and cooperatives have had a stormy history. There are, of course, the army and navy, which no man wishes to see organized by private individuals on the make. The most conservative have doubted recently whether armaments should be manufactured for profit. Yet such analogies, impressive as they are, offer nothing conclusive. But if we find that in the staple industries like steel and oil a silent revolution is in progress, then we have a basis for action. If there the profit-motive is decadent and new incentives ready, then perhaps what look like irresponsible outcries and wanton agitation will assume the dignity of a new morality.

In the last thirty years or so American business has been passing through a reorganization so radical that we are just beginning to grasp its meaning. At any rate for those of us who are young today the business world of our grandfathers is a piece of history that we can reconstruct only with the greatest difficulty. We know that the huge corporation, the integrated industry, production for a world market, the network of combinations, pools and agreements have played havoc with the older political economy. The scope of human endeavor is enormously larger, and with it has come, as Graham Wallas says, a general change of social scale. Human thought has had to enlarge its scale in order to meet the situation. That is why it is not very illuminating to say, for example, that the principles of righteousness are eternal and that the solution of every problem is in the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule in a village, and the Golden Rule for a nation of a hundred million people are two very different things. I might possibly treat my neighbor as myself, but in this vast modern world the greatest problem that confronts me is to find my neighbor and treat him at all. The size and intricacy which we have to deal with have done more than anything else, I imagine, to wreck the simple generalizations of our ancestors. After all, they were not prophets, and the conservative today makes an inhuman demand when he expects them to have laid out a business policy for a world they never even imagined. If anyone thinks that the Fathers might have done this let him sit down and write a political economy for the year 1950.

'Since the Sherman Act was passed (1890),’ says President Van Hise of Wisconsin University, 'a child born has attained its majority.'' Indeed he has, much to the surprise of the unwilling parents. Now a new business world has produced a new kind of business man. For it requires a different order of ability to conduct the Steel Trust, than it did to manage a primitive blast-furnace by means of a partnership. The giant corporation calls for an equipment unlike any that business has ever known: the minds of the managers are occupied with problems beyond the circle of ideas that interested the old-fashioned chop-whiskered merchants. They have to preserve intimate contact with physicists and chemists, there is probably a research laboratory attached to the plant. They have to deal with huge masses of workingmen becoming every day more articulate. They have to think about the kind of training our public schools give. They have to consider very concretely the psychology of races, they come into contact with the structure of credit, and a money squeeze due to the Balkan war makes a difference in their rate of output. They have to keep thousands of ignorant stockholders somewhere in the back of their mind, people who don't know the difference between puddling and pudding. They may find themselves an issue in a political campaign, and if they are to be successful they must estimate correctly the social temper of the community. Diplomacy is closely related to the selling department, and perhaps at times they may have to dabble in Latin-American revolutions.

Mr. Louis D. Brandeis commented on this change of scale in his testimony before the Committee on Interstate Commerce.

'Anyone who critically analyzes a business learns this: that success or failure of an enterprise depends usually upon one man.... Now while organization has made it possible for the individual man to accomplish infinitely more than he could before, aided as he is by new methods of communication, by the stenographer, the telephone, and system, still there is a limit for what one man can do well... When, therefore, you increase your business to a very great extent, and the multitude of problems increases with its growth, you will find, in the first place, that the man at the head has a diminishing knowledge of the facts, and, in the second place, a diminishing opportunity of exercising careful judgment upon them.’

In this statement, you will find, I believe, one of the essential reasons why a man of Mr. Brandeis's imaginative power has turned against the modern trust. He does not believe that men can deal efficiently with the scale upon which the modern business world is organized. He has said quite frankly, that economic size is in itself a danger to democracy. This means, I take it, that American voters are not intelligent enough or powerful enough to dominate great industrial organizations. So Mr. Brandeis, in company with many important thinkers the world over, has turned de-centralizer. The experience of history justifies his position in many respects: there is no doubt that an organization like the Holy Roman Empire was too large for the political capacity of human beings. It is probably true that the Morgan empire had become unwieldy. It may be that the Steel Trust is too large for efficiency. The splendid civilizations of the past have appeared in small cities. Today if you go about the world you find that the small countries like Belgium, Holland, Denmark, are the ones that have come nearest to a high level of social prosperity. I once heard George Russell (Æ ), the Irish poet and reformer, say that an ideal state would be about the size of County Cork.

Yet it is not very helpful to insist that size is a danger, unless you can specify what size.

The senators asked Mr. Brandeis that question. They pressed him to state approximately what percentage of an industry he considered an effective unit. He hesitated between ten per cent and forty per cent, and could not commit himself. Obviously, ? or how could Mr. Brandeis be expected to know? Adam Smith thought the corporations of his day doomed to failure on the very same grounds that Mr. Brandeis urges against the modern corporation. Now the million dollar organization is not too large for efficiency and the billion dollar one may be. The ideal unit may fall somewhere between? Where? That is a problem which experiments alone can decide, experiments conducted by experts in the new science of administration.

The development of that science is the only answer to the point Mr. Brandeis raises. Remarkable results have already been produced. Every one of us, for example, must wonder at times how the President of the United States ever does all the things the papers say he does. When, for example, does the man sleep? And is he omniscient? The fact is that administration is becoming an applied science, capable of devising executive methods for dealing with tremendous units. No doubt the President with his increasing responsibilities is an overworked man. No doubt there are trusts badly administered. No doubt there are inflated monopolies created for purely financial reasons. But just what the limits of administrative science are, a legislature is no more capable of determining than was Mr. Brandeis. Only experience, only trial and ingenuity, can demonstrate, and in a research so young and so swift in its progress, any effort to assign by law an arbitrary limit is surely the most obvious meddling. Say to-day that one unit of business is impossible, to-morrow you may be confronted with an undreamt success. Here if anywhere is a place where negative prophecy is futile. It is well to remember the classic case of that great scientist Simon Newcomb, who said that man would never fly. Two years before that statement was made, the Wright brothers had made secret flights.

It may well be that the best unit is smaller than some of the modern trusts. It does not follow that we must break up industry into units of administration whose ideal efficiency is spent in competing with one another. I can understand, for example, the desire of many people to see Europe composed of a larger number of small nations. But I take it that everyone wishes these small nations to cooperate in the creation of a common European civilization. So it is with business. The unit of administration may be whatever efficiency demands. It may be that the steel industry would gain if it were conducted by forty corporations. But at the same time there are advantages in common action which we cannot afford to abandon. Technical improvement must be for the whole industry, the labor market must be organized and made stable, output must be adjusted to a common plan. The appearance of federal organization seems to suggest a possible compromise in which the administrative need for decentralization is combined with the social demand for a unified industrial policy.

No one, surely, proposes to revive the little business monarch who brooded watchfully over every operation in factory and office, called his workingmen by their pet names, and was impelled at almost every turn by Adam Smith's 'natural propensity to truck and barter.’ For just as in political government 'the President’ does a hundred things every day he may never even hear of, just as the English Crown acts constantly through some unknown civil servant at $1,500 a year, ? so in big business,? the real government is passing into a hierarchy of managers and deputies, who, by what would look like a miracle to Adam Smith, are able to cooperate pretty well toward a common end. They are doing that, remember, in the first generation of administrative science. They come to it unprepared, from a nation that is suspicious and grudging. They have no tradition to work with, the old commercial morality of the exploiter and profiteer still surrounds these new rulers of industry. Perhaps they are unaware that they are revolutionizing the discipline, the incentives, and the vision of the business world. They do brutal and stupid things, and their essential work is obscured. But they are conducting business on a scale without precedent in history.

The real news about business, it seems to me, is that it is being administered by men who are not profiteers. The managers are on salary, divorced from ownership and from bargaining. They represent the revolution in business-incentives at its very heart. For they conduct gigantic enterprises and they stand outside the higgling of the market, outside the shrewdness and strategy of competition. The motive of profit is not their personal motive. That is an astounding change. The administration of the great industries is passing into the hands of men who cannot halt before each transaction and ask themselves: what is my duty as the Economic Man looking for immediate gain? They have to live on their salaries, and hope for promotion, but their day's work is not measured in profit. There are thousands of these men, each with responsibilities vaster than the patriarchs of industry they have supplanted. It is for the commercial theorists to prove that the 'ability’ is inferior, and talent less available.

It is no accident that the universities have begun to create graduate schools of business-administration. Fifty years ago industry was an adventure or perhaps a family tradition. But to-day it is becoming a profession with university standing equal to that of law, medicine, or engineering. The universities are supplying a demand. It is big business, I believe, which has created that demand. For it is no longer possible to deal with the present scale of industry if your only equipment is what men used to call 'experience,’ that is, a haphazard absorption of knowledge through the pores. Just as it is no longer possible to become a physician by living with doctors, just as law cannot be grasped by starting as a clerk in some attorney's office, so business requires a greater preparation than a man can get by being a bright, observant, studious, ambitious office boy, who saves his money and is good to his mother.

What it will mean to have business administered by men with a professional training is a rather difficult speculation. That it is a very far-reaching psychological change, I have no doubt. The professions bring with them a fellowship in interest, a standard of ethics, an esprit de corps, and a decided discipline. They break up that sense of sullen privacy which made the old-fashioned business man so impervious to new facts and so shockingly ignorant of the larger demands of civilized life. I know that the professions develop their pedantry, but who was ever more finicky, more rigid in his thinking than the self-satisfied merchant? It would be idle to suppose that we are going suddenly to develop a nation of reasonable men. But at least we are going to have an increasing number of 'practical’ men who have come in contact with the scientific method. That is an enormous gain over the older manufacturers and merchants. They were shrewd, hard-working, no doubt, but they were fundamentally uneducated. They had no discipline for making wisdom out of their experience. They had almost no imaginative training to soften their primitive ambitions. But doctors and engineers and professional men, generally, have something more than a desire to accumulate and outshine their neighbors. They have found an interest in the actual work they are doing. The work itself is in a measure its own reward. The instincts of workmanship, of control over brute things, the desire for order, the satisfaction of services rendered and uses created, the civilizing passions are given a chance to temper the primal desire to have and to hold and to conquer.

The Magic of Property

The ordinary editorial writer is a strong believer in what he calls the sanctity of private property. But as far as highly organized business is concerned he is a pilgrim to an empty shrine. The trust movement is doing what no conspirator or revolutionist could ever do: it is sucking the life out of private property.

For the purposes of modern industry the traditional notions have become meaningless: the name continues, but the fact is disappearing. You cannot conduct the great industries and preserve intact the principles of private property. And so the trusts are organizing private property out of existence, are altering its nature so radically that very little remains but the title and the ancient theory.

When a man buys stock in some large corporation he becomes in theory one of its owners. He is supposed to be exercising his instinct of private property. But how in fact does he exercise that instinct which we are told is the only real force in civilization? He may never see his property. He may not know where his property is situated. He is not consulted as to its management. He would be utterly incapable of advice if he were consulted. Contact with his property is limited to reading in the newspapers what it is worth each day, and hoping that dividends will be paid. The processes which make him rich in the morning and poor in the evening, increase his income or decrease it, ? are inscrutable mysteries. Compare him with the farmer who owns his land, the homesteader or the prospector, compare him with anyone who has a real sense of possession, and you will find, I think, that the modern shareholder is a very feeble representative of the institution of private property.

No one has ever had a more abstract relation to the thing he owned. The absentee landlord is one of the sinister figures of history. But the modern shareholder is not only an absentee, he is a transient too. The week ending January 10, 1914, was generally regarded as a dull one in Wall Street. Yet on the New York Stock Exchange alone the total sales amounted to 1,777,038 shares. About 340,000 shares of private property in Reading changed hands.

With a few thousand dollars I can be an owner in Massachusetts textile mills on Monday, in Union Pacific on Tuesday. I can flit like a butterfly from industry to industry. I don't even have to use my judgment as to where I shall alight. All I have to do is to choose some well-known stock broker and put myself into his hands. And when I read in books on political economy that any profit I make is a reward for my foresight, my courage in the face of risk, I laugh. I know that I can't have any foresight. I don't understand the inner workings of the business world. I'm not allowed to know. That is reserved for specialists like stock brokers and private bankers. In the modern world investing has become a highly skilled profession, altogether beyond the capacities of the ordinary shareholder. The great mass of people who have saved a little money can no more deal with their property on their own initiative than they can deal with disease or war on their own initiative. They have to act through representatives. Just as they need physicians and organized armies, so they have to have stock brokers, financial experts, public service commissions and the rest.

There has been in recent years a great outcry against the concentrated control of credit. It was found that the decision as to how money should be invested had passed away from the people who owned the money. The enormous power of Morgan consisted in his ability to direct the flow of capital. He was the head of a vast system which had taken out of the hands of investors the task of deciding how their money was to be used. It was no doubt a colossal autocracy. There has been a great effort to break it up, to decentralize the power that concentrated about Morgan. But no one proposes to put back into the hands of the investor the decision as to the financing of industry. The investors are a scattered mob incapable of such decisions. The question of where money is to be applied is a matter for experts to answer. And so reform of the credit system does not consist in abolishing the financial expert. It consists in making him a public servant. The Wilson Currency Bill seems to be an effort to make banking responsive to business needs all over the country. It gives business men a larger control over financial experts. How that control is to be extended to the citizens at large is one of the subtlest problems of democracy. I do not venture here to answer it. I wish rather to keep more closely to the fact that whatever system is devised, it will have to recognize that the investor no longer can decide in modern industry, that 'foresight’ has become an organized, technical profession, and is ceasing to be one of the duties of private property.

Not long ago the Interstate Commerce Commission gave a very neat recognition to this change. It issued a report on the bankruptcy of the Frisco railway which contained a condemnation of certain private bankers for offering bonds to the investing public when the bankers should have known that the road was insolvent. The Commission was saying that the investor couldn't know, that he was in the hands of experts, and that the experts have a trust to perform. You couldn't very well go to greater lengths in announcing the impotence of private property. For where in the name of sanity have all the courage, foresight, initiative gone to, what has happened to all the rugged virtues that are supposed to be inherent in the magic of property?

They have gone a-glimmering with the revolutionary change that the great industry has produced. Those personal virtues belong to an earlier age when men really had some personal contact with their property. But to-day the central condition of business is that capital shall be impersonal, 'liquid,’ 'mobile.’ The modern shareholder as a person is of no account whatever. It mattered very much what kind of people the old landlords were. But it matters not at all what kind of person the shareholder is. He may be ignorant or wise, he may be a child in arms or a greybeard in his dotage, he may live in Iceland or Patagonia: he has no genuine role in the conduct of industry. He cannot fulfill any responsibility to the property he owns. That is why it is so futile to attack clergymen and reformers who happen to own stock in some ruthless factory. They have no real power to alter the situation.

You often hear it said that the stockholders must be made to realize their duties. Not long ago, for example, when the wretched working conditions of the Steel Mills were exposed, a very well-meaning minority stockholder did protest and cause a slight flurry in the newspapers. But the notion that the 200,000 owners of the Steel Trust can ever be aroused to energetic, public-spirited control of 'their’ property? that is as fantastic as anything that ever issued from the brain of a lazy moralist. Scattered all over the globe, changing from day to day, the shareholders are the most incompetent constituency conceivable. Think how difficult it is to make the voters in one town exhibit any capacity for their task. Well, the voters in the government of the Steel Trust do not meet each other every day, do not read the same newspapers: the suffrage qualifications for the Steel Trust have nothing to do with age, sex, nationality, residence, literacy; the one qualification is the possession of some money and the desire for more. Shareholders are a heterogeneous collection with a single motive, and from that material some people pretend to expect a high sense of social responsibility.

I do not mean to imply, of course, that because a man owns stock he is necessarily ignorant or tyrannical. He may be as benevolent as you please. But the fact that he owns stock will not enable him to practice his benevolence. He will have to find other ways of expressing it. For shareholding in the modern world is not adapted to the exercise of any civilizing passion. It is too abstract, too scattered, too fluctuating.

All this is a natural result of the largescale corporation. In the partnership and firm, owners and managers are in general the same people, but the corporation has separated ownership from management. Ownership has been opened to a far larger number of people than it ever was before, and it means less than it used to. Each stockholder owns a smaller share in a far greater whole. The trusts have concentrated control and management, but ownership they have diffused and diluted till it means very little more than a claim to residual profits, after expenses are paid, after the bondholders are satisfied, and perhaps, after the insiders have decided which way they wish the stock market to fluctuate.

Let no stockholder come to the radical, then, and charge him with attacking the sanctity of private property. The evolution of business is doing that at a rate and with a dispatch which will make future historians gasp. If the reformers should, for example, arrive at the point of deciding to abolish private property in railroads, they would discover that most of the rights of property had already disappeared. Management has long ago passed out of the hands of the stockholders; the right to fix rates has been absorbed by the state; the right to fix wages is conditioned by very powerful unions. They would find stockholding in the last stages of decay, where not even the dividends were certain. And one of the most difficult problems reformers may have to face will be the eagerness of railroad owners to give up the few vestiges of private property which are left to them, if they can secure instead government bonds. They may feel far happier as creditors of the United States than as representatives of the institution of private property.

Government ownership will probably be a very good bargain for railroad stockholders. To-day they are a little less than creditors; they loan their money, and they are not sure of a return. Government ownership may make them real creditors? that is the highest hope which remains from the shattered glamour that came from the magic of property.

What has happened to the railroads is merely a demonstration of what is likely to happen to the other great industries? steel, oil, lumber, coal and all the others which are adapted to large scale production. Private property will melt away; its functions will be taken over by the salaried men who direct them, by government commissions, by developing labor unions. The stockholders deprived of their property rights are being transformed into money-lenders.

It is evident that the question of nationalizing industries is not a choice between the maintenance of private property and its abolition. In amateur socialist discussions this is always made the issue whenever someone proposes to substitute public operation for private. It betrays an unreal sense of the problem. There is no very essential difference between holding the securities of the Steel Trust and those of the U.S. Government. The government bonds are, if anything, a more certain investment. But there is some difference between public and private enterprise: what is it?

Opponents of collectivism argue that government work is inefficient. They seem to imply that the alleged superiority of private management is due to the institution of private property. That, it seems to me, is a striking example of what logicians call false cause. If the Steel Trust is efficient, it is not due to the existence of its 200,000 stockholders. It is due to the fact that the management is autocratic, that administrators are highly paid, and given power adequate to their responsibility. When governments are willing to pursue that course, they can be just as efficient as private management. The construction of the Panama Canal is a classic example of what government can do if it is ready to centralize power and let it work without democratic interruption.

The real problem of collectivism is the difficulty of combining popular control with administrative power. Private property is no part of the issue. For any industry which was ready for collectivism would have abolished private property before the question arose. What would remain for discussion would be the conflict between democracy and centralized authority. That is the line upon which the problems of collectivism will be fought out? how much power shall be given to the employees, how much to the ultimate consumer, how much to sectional interests, how much to national ones. Anyone who has watched the disillusionment of labor with the earlier socialism and has understood the meaning of the syndicalist trend will know how radically the real difficulties of public enterprise differ from those presented in theoretical debates.

I do not wish at this point to draw any conclusion as to the solution of the trust problem. I am trying to sketch very roughly the main elements in the actual situation. The incentive of the men who conduct modern industry was the first point of interest. It is obvious that the trusts have created a demand for a new type of business man? for a man whose motives resemble those of the applied scientist and whose responsibility is that of a public servant. Nothing would be easier than to shout for joy, and say that everything is about to be fine: the business men are undergoing a change of heart. That is just what an endless number of American reformers are shouting, and their prophet is Gerald Stanley Lee. The notion seems to be that workers, politicians, consumers and the rest are to have no real part in the glorious revolution which is to be consummated for their benefit. It is not hard to understand the habit of mind which leads men to these conclusions. The modern world is brain-splitting in its complexity, and if you succeed in disentangling from it some hopeful trend there is nothing more restful than to call it the solution of the problem. Those who have seen the change in business motives have, I believe, good ground for rejoicing, but they might in decency refrain from erecting upon it a mystic and rhetorical commercialism.

For the same reason, it is well not to take too literally the revolution in private property. This revolution has not happened to all property. It is most advanced in the railroads and what we call public service corporations. It is imminent in the big staple industries which are adapted to large scale production. But there remains a vast amount of genuine private property in agricultural land, in competitive business.

In the great industries themselves, however, it is important to notice that with the diminishing importance of ownership, the control has passed for the time being into the hands of investment experts, the banking interests. That control is challenged now, not by the decadent stockholders, but by those most interested in the methods of industry: the consumer, the worker, and the citizen at large.

Caveat Emptor

I am sure that few consumers feel any of that sense of power which economists say is theirs. No doubt when Mr. Morgan was buying antiques there came to him a real sense that he commanded the market. But the ordinary man with a small income to spend is much more like a person who becomes attached to an energetic bulldog, and leaves the spectators wondering which is the mover and which the moved. He is the theoretical master of that dog ...
The consumer is sometimes represented as the person whose desires govern industry. Actually, he is an ignorant person who buys in the dark. He takes what he can get at the price he can afford. He is told what he wants, and then he wants it. He rides in a packed subway because he has to, and he buys a certain kind of soap because it has been thrust upon his soul. Where there is a monopoly the consumer is, of course, helpless, and where there is competition he is almost entirely at the mercy of advertising.

Advertising, in fact, is the effort of business men to take charge of consumption as well as production. They are not content to supply a demand, as the text-books say; they educate the demand as well. In the end, advertising rests upon the fact that consumers are a fickle and superstitious mob, incapable of any real judgment as to what it wants or how it is to get what it thinks it would like. A bewildered child in a toy shop is nothing to the ultimate consumer in the world market of to-day. To say, then, that advertising is merely a way of calling attention to useful goods is a gorgeous piece of idealization. Advertising is in fact the weed that has grown up because the art of consumption is uncultivated. By advertising I don't mean descriptive catalogues which enable the buyer to select. I mean the deceptive clamor that disfigures the scenery, covers fences, plasters the city, and blinks and winks at you through the night. When you contemplate the eastern sky ablaze with chewing gum, the northern with tooth-brushes and underwear, the western with whiskey, and the southern with petticoats, the whole heavens brilliant with monstrously flirtatious women, when you glance at magazines in which a rivulet of text trickles through meadows of automobiles, baking powders, corsets and kodaks, you begin to accumulate a sense of the disastrous incompetence of the ultimate consumer.

For the scale on which the world is organized to-day discrimination has become impossible for the ordinary purchaser. He hasn't time to candle every egg he buys, test the milk, inquire into the origins of the meat, analyze the canned food, distinguish the shoddy, find out whether the newspapers are lying, avoid meretricious plays, and choose only railroads equipped with safety devices. These things have to be done for him by experts backed with authority to enforce their decisions. In our intricate civilization the purchaser can't pit himself against the producer, for he lacks knowledge and power to make the bargain a fair one. By the time goods are ready for the ultimate consumer they have travelled hundreds of miles, passed through any number of wholesalers, jobbers, middlemen and what not. The simple act of buying has become a vast, impersonal thing which the ordinary man is quite incapable of performing without all sorts of organized aid. There are silly anarchists who talk as if such organization were a loss of freedom. They seem to imagine that they can 'stand alone,’ and judge each thing for themselves. They might try it. They would find that the purchase of eggs was such a stupendous task that no time would be left over for the purchase of beer or the pursuit of those higher freedoms for which they are fighting.

The old commercial theorists had some inkling of these difficulties. They knew that the consumer could not possibly make each purchase a deliberate and intelligent act. So they said that if only business men were left to compete they would stumble over each other to supply the consumer with the most satisfactory goods. It is hardly necessary to point out how complete has been the collapse of that romantic theory. There are a hundred ways of competing, to produce the highest quality at the lowest cost proved to be the most troublesome and least rewarding form of competition. To cheapen the quality, subtract value that does not appear on the surface, lower the standards of workmanship, to adulterate, in short, was a more 'natural’ method of competition than the noble Platonic method which economists talked about. And then came price agreements, the elimination of 'cut-throat’ competition, and the consumer began to realize that he couldn't trust to the naive notions of the nineteenth century.

He turned to the government for aid, and out of that has grown a fresh sense of the uses of politics. The old commercialists saw in government little more than the police power; the modern syndicalists refuse to believe that the state can be anything but an agent of tyranny. But the facts belie both notions. Politics is becoming the chief method by which the consumer enforces his interests upon the industrial system.

Many radical socialists pretend to regard the consumer's interest as a rather mythical one. 'All the people’ sounds so sentimental, so far removed from the clash of actual events. But we are finding, I think, that the real power emerging to-day in democratic politics is just the mass of people who are crying out against the 'high cost of living.’ That is a consumer's cry. Far from being an impotent one, it is, I believe, destined to be stronger than the interests either of labor or of capital. With the consumer awake, neither the worker nor the employer can use politics for his special interest. The public, which is more numerous than either side, is coming to be the determining force in government.

Votes for women will increase the power of the consumer enormously. The mass of women do not look at the world as workers; in America, at least their prime interest is as consumers. It is they who go to market and do the shopping; it is they who have to make the family budget go around; it is they who feel shabbiness and fraud and high prices most directly. They have more time for politics than men, and it is no idle speculation to say that their influence will make the consumer the real master of the political situation.

It is through government that people are seeking to impose upon business a maximum of quality and a minimum of cost. Price fixing is already in operation for public utilities; there is every reason to believe that it will be extended to the great industries. The amount of inspecting of products which is already being done it is impossible to record. I don't say that it is effective or satisfactory, but it is a force to be reckoned with and it is sure to grow. We hear a great deal about the class-consciousness of labor; my own observation is that in America to-day consumers'-consciousness is growing very much faster.

What forms it will assume with time is not easy to predict. The great extension of collectivism which is at hand will be carried through and dominated by the 'public.’ The workers will have very little to say about it, as workers. The public is capable of oppression, I have no doubt, and when I say that consumers are going to dominate the government I do not state the fact with unmixed joy. There will be a tyranny of the majority for which minorities will have to prepare. But good or bad, collectivism or 'state socialism’ is perhaps the chief instrument of the awakened consumer.

One of the heritages from competitive business was almost complete disorganization in selling of wares. Six grocers in three blocks, dingy little butcher-shops, little retail businesses with the family living in the back room, the odor of cooking to greet you as you enter the door, fly-specks on the goods? walk through any city and marvel at the anarchy of retail business. Well, the large department store, organized markets, the chain of stores, the mail order business, are changing the situation radically for the purchaser.

They are focusing his attention: he could not focus on a congery of little shops. But where there is centralization, he has something of which to take hold. The solidarity of the consumer is made possible, just as large scale production is making possible a much greater solidarity for labor. But it is doubtful whether the public will be satisfied to stand outside these large retail organizations, and try to regulate them through government inspectors. The example of the English Cooperative Societies is very attractive. They represent a power for the consumer, and in the face of the high cost of living, the consumer is looking for power.

Business, then, must look forward to increasing control in the interests of those who buy. Processes will be inspected, and regulated by law, some industries will be operated directly by the government, and producers in general may face cooperative organizations grown powerful enough perhaps to command the market. Those seem to be the general methods by which the consumer is trying to redeem his helplessness in the complexity of the newly organized industrial world.

It is interesting to notice the revolutionary standards which are being generated by this young social power. Take the matter of prices. That, after all, is the first item that interests the purchaser. Quality is a subtler notion. But in the matter of prices, there is coming into existence an idea that profits can be 'unreasonable.’ It is an idea that runs counter to the whole fabric of the old commercialism, where the only recognized motive was profit and the only ideal all that the traffic would bear. To talk about 'reasonable returns’ is to begin an attack on industrialism which will lead far beyond the present imaginations of the people who talk about it. The whole question of unearned wealth is opened up, for 'unreasonable'' profit can mean only unearned profit. Just where those words lead nobody seems to know. But there is a groping behind them which points without question to a radical attack on large incomes. The consumer talks about 'reasonable return’ because he feels that any profit which keeps prices high must be unreasonable. That may seem a curious logic, but it's the kind of logic which half-conscious democracies use."

A Key to the Labor Movement

When employers talk about the freedom of labor, it may be that some of them are really worried over the hostility of most unions to exceptional rewards for exceptional workers. But in the main that isn't what worries them. They are worried about their own freedom, not the freedom of wage-earners. They dislike the union because it challenges their supremacy.

And they fight unions as monarchs fight constitutions, as aristocracies fight the vote. When an employer tells about his own virtues, he dilates upon his kindness, his fairness, and all the good things he has done for his men. That is just what benevolent autocrats do: they try to justify their autocracy by their benevolence. Indeed, the highest vision of those who oppose unions is that the employer will develop the virtues of a good aristocrat.

But, of course, wage-earners are not dealing with men inspired by a sense of noblesse or richesse oblige. Henry Ford is a sensational rarity among employers. No doubt there are some others, not so conspicuous. Now, if workers faced only men with such an outlook, I don't think their problem would be solved, but it would take on a very different complexion. This is, however, an academic question, for the great mass of employers show no desire to make big concessions.

Employers are organized for obstruction. There is, for example, the National Association of Manufacturers, embracing four thousand individual employers, who represent a capital of about ten billion dollars. Their constructive program consists of such attractive items as 'unalterable antagonism to the closed shop,’ opposition to eight-hours' bills, and with mild emphasis hostility 'to any and all anti-injunction bills of whatever kind.’ American civilization is also assisted by the National Council for Industrial Defense, an unincorporated body which employs a lobbyist at the rate of a thousand dollars a month. According to the proud words of its late President, this Council 'in the number of members, in the capital which they control, and in the social, industrial and political influence which they exert ...is by far the largest and most powerful league of conservative and public-spirited citizens ever formed in any country of the world.’

There are also a number of national associations in various trades endeavoring to prevent wage-earners from submerging their individuality in unions. They have been known to refuse advertising to papers which were friendly to organized labor? on the highest grounds, of course, such high grounds being a refusal 'to pander to the unthrifty class.’ They have been known to use the black-list, though of course they do not approve of it. They have been known to place spies in labor unions to protect workers against themselves. They have been known to use what revolutionists call the 'provocateur'': in Cleveland during the garment strike there was a glib, plausible person who talked dynamite in an effort to discredit the union. There have been some actual 'planting’ of dynamite as at Lawrence, a little beating up as at Calumet, kidnapping, private armies, gatling guns and armored trains as at West Virginia and Colorado.

It is well known, of course, that newspapers make every effort to enable workingmen to reach public opinion, and make their appeal not to force but to the national conscience. All civil rights are carefully guarded for workers as in Paterson, Lawrence, and the southern lumber camps. Employers are precise in their desire to secure judges who have no bias whatever. And the voters are an active, intelligent body of imaginative democrats fighting at every step to see that justice is done.

The fact is that nothing is so stubbornly resisted as the attempt to organize labor into effective unions. Yet it is labor organized that alone can stand between America and the creation of a permanent, servile class. Unless labor is powerful enough to be respected, it is doomed to a degrading servitude. Without unions no such power is possible. Without unions industrial democracy is unthinkable. Without democracy in industry, that is where it counts most, there is no such thing as democracy in America. For only through the union can the wage-earner participate in the control of industry, and only through the union can he obtain the discipline needed for self-government. Those who fight unions may think they are fighting its obvious errors, but what they are really against is just this encroachment of democracy upon business.

Now men don't agitate for democracy because it is a fine theory. They come to desire it because they have to, because absolutism does not work out any longer to civilized ends. Employers are not wise enough to govern their men with unlimited power, and not generous enough to be trusted with autocracy. That is the plain fact of the situation: the essential reason why private industry has got to prepare itself for democratic control.

I don't pretend for one moment that labor unions are far-seeing, intelligent, or wise in their tactics. I have never seen a political democracy that aroused uncritical enthusiasm. It seems to me simply that the effort to build up unions is as much the work of pioneers, as the extension of civilization into the wilderness. The unions are the first feeble effort to conquer the industrial jungle for democratic life. They may not succeed, but if they don't their failure will be a tragedy for civilization, a loss of cooperative effort, a baulking of energy, and the fixing in American life of a class-structure.

The unions are struggling where life is nakedly brutal, where the dealings of men have not been raised even to the level of discussion which we find in politics. There is almost as little civil procedure in industry as there is in Mexico, or as there was on the American frontier. To expect unionists then to talk with velvet language, and act with the deliberation of a college faculty is to be a tenderfoot, a victim of your class tradition. The virtues of labor to-day are frontier virtues, its struggles are for rights and privileges that the rest of us inherited from our unrefined ancestors.

Men are fighting for the beginnings of industrial self-government. If the world were wise that fight would be made easier for them. But it is not wise. Few of us care for ten minutes in a month about these beginnings or what they promise. And so the burden falls entirely upon the workers who are directly concerned. They have got to win civilization, they have got to take up the task of fastening a worker's control upon business.

No wonder they despise the scab. He is justly despised. Far from being the independent, liberty-loving soul he is sometimes painted, the scab is a traitor to the economic foundations of democracy. He. makes the basic associations of men difficult. He is an indigestible lump in the common life, and it is he who generates nine-tenths of the violence in labor disputes. Democracies of workingmen have to fight him out of sheer self-protection, as a nation has to fight a mutiny, as doctors have to fight a quack. The clubbing of scabs is not a pretty thing; the importation of scabs is an uglier one. It is perhaps true that there is, as ex-President Eliot said, no such thing as peaceful picketing. There is no such thing as a peaceful coast defense or a gentlemanly border patrol. The picket-line is to these little economic democracies the guardian of their integrity, their chief protection from foreign invasion.

Without some security no internal growth is possible. As long as the unions have to fight for mere existence, their immense constructive possibilities will be obscured in the desperation of the struggle. The strike-breaker, then, is not only a peril to the union, he is a peril to the larger interests of the nation. He keeps workingmen from their natural organization, deprives them of the strength that union brings, and thwarts all attempts to train men for industrial democracy. Instead of discipline and preparation for the task of the future, instead of deep-grounded experience in cooperative effort, we shall get, if strike-breakers and blind legislators and brutal policemen and prejudiced judges and visionless employers prevail, despair and hate and servile rebellions.

There are certain preliminaries of civilization which the great mass of workingmen have not yet won. They have not yet won a living wage, they have not yet won anything like security of employment, they have not yet won respect from the government, they have not yet won the right to be consulted as to the conditions under which they work. Until they do, it is idle to talk about industrial peace, and folly to look for 'reasonable’ adjustments of difficulties. Reason begins when men have enough power to command respect; a cooperative solution of industrial problems is possible only when all the partners to the cooperation must listen to each other. Until labor is powerful enough to compel that, it cannot trust to the benevolence of its masters,? it has to be suspicious, it has to cling to the few weapons left it, for labor is right in supposing that no national conscience and no employers' conscience yet exhibited are adequate.

There are certain occupations where workingmen have won these preliminaries of civilized life. The most notable example is in railroading, where the Brotherhoods have become a real part of the industrial structure. They are so powerful that they can't be left out. More than that, they are so powerful that they don't have to flirt with insurrection. It is the weak unions, the unorganized and shifting workers, who talk sabotage and flare up into a hundred little popgun rebellions. Guerilla warfare is the only tactic open to weakness. But where unions can meet the employers on a real equality, as railroad workers can, there you will find very little insurrectionary talk.

You will meet in these powerful unions what radical labor leaders call conservatism. That is a very interesting accusation. The railroad men have won wages and respect far beyond anything that the I.W.W. can hope for. They have power which makes the I.W.W. look insignificant. If the I.W.W. could win for the unskilled anything like the position and responsibility that railroad men enjoy, it would have achieved something that might well be called a social revolution. The fact is that the railroad men are 'conservatives’ in the labor world, just as the Swiss are conservatives among the nations. They have won the very things the lack of which makes rebellion necessary. For if men are ground down in poverty, if the rights of assemblage and free speech are denied them, if their protests are ineffective and despised, then rebellion is the only possible way out. But when there is something like a democracy where wrong is not a matter of life and death, but of better and worse, then the preliminaries of civilization have been achieved, and more deliberate tactics become possible.

The I.W.W., the anarchists and the syndicalists know this. That is why the reformer is an object of special hatred amongst them. They say, quite rightly, that reform undermines the revolutionary spirit, and substitutes for flaming impatience and heroic moods, concrete adjustments and grudging change. They say that only passionate revolt can redeem society from stagnant mediocrity. They prefer the atmosphere of temporary rebellion to the somewhat slow-footed and generally uninspired method of a clumsy democracy. Thus the I.W.W. makes no real effort to build up permanent unions. That is to say, it does not look with favor upon the cohesive power of funds and fraternal benefits. I have heard Haywood say that when a union had something to lose, the spontaneity of rebellion was gone. He hopes to unite wage-earners by militant feeling, rather than to knit them together by common discipline and common interests. The I.W.W. prefers revolt to solidarity—of course, it imagines that it can have workers united and militant too. But in practice it is quite ready to destroy union for the sake of militancy.

Syndicalists and anarchists half recognize the fact that only a small minority of the workers can be aroused to bitter revolt. So they have begun to sing the praises of a 'conscious minority.’ In other words they have abandoned the path of democracy, because it is incompatible with the temper they most admire. Workers who were really effectively organized would produce great changes in our social structure, but they would have to act with a deliberation that no temperamental anarchist can stomach. This is the paradox of the labor movement, that those who can't overthrow society dream of doing it, while those who could, don't want to. If there is one occupation where syndicalist tactics might work, it would be on the railroads. A small minority could paralyze the country and precipitate a General Strike. But American railroad men are not likely to do this because they don't need to. They have a stake in the country, a genuine representation in public opinion, and they can at all times secure a respectful hearing. If that were taken away from them, if their unions were disintegrated, they too might take to conspiracy.

It is a commonplace of radicalism that power makes for peace. It is deeply true of the labor movement that the alternatives before it are powerful peace and weak insurrection. Thus if the I.W.W. should succeed in organizing the unskilled on any extensive scale, the I.W.W., as we know it, would have abolished itself. For the unions which were created would inevitably seek a different type of leader: men of administrative capacity who can wield power without exhausting it. The extreme weakness of the unskilled workers has made them listen so eagerly to the large hopes of men like Haywood, Ettor and Giovannitti. Wherever democracy is feeble vague insurrection is its dream. And so the civilized hope for labor is conditioned upon its conquest of power in the life of the nation. This alone will make peaceful adjustments possible, not the moral guardianship of the employers, not the charity of the community. It is the rich who don't need ready cash, it is the strong who don't have to fight.

I know how offensive all this will be to refined and sensitive people. Those who believe in disarmament have come to think that the possession of power is a temptation to use it. Perhaps that is true. But wage-earners have no choice in the matter. If they abandon power, employers will not abandon theirs. To preach mere peace, then, is to preach a docile exploitation. Perhaps when society has learned to respect labor, then society and labor will disarm. But that day is not our day. It is not pleasant, but it's true: if labor turns the other cheek, that cheek will be smitten without much compunction. For the Golden Rule works best among equals.
So the real peril to the nation from the side of labor is the existence of great masses of unorganized, and perhaps unorganizable, workers. From them will come most of the street-fights, the beatings and the sabotage.

They have no share in the country, they have 'nothing to lose but their chains.’ But with the tactics open to them they haven't 'a world to win.’ They can parade and shout, call the police 'cossacks,’ and talk revolution. But they have to put up with the pettiest gains.

To the weakness of all labor is to be ascribed its lack of interest in the efficiency of industry. An employer will tell you in one breath that he will stand no interference with 'his’ business, and in the next that his employees take no interest in that business. Of course they don't. They haven't any interest. They are unconsulted outsiders. You might as well expect an Indian peasant to be interested in the administrative efficiency of the British government. What possibility is there for a sense of craftsmanship when you are a mere hired hand? What incentive have wage-earners to take a personal interest in the problems of industry, when nobody asks their advice, and everybody resents it? If labor is apathetic, hostile to efficiency, without much pride, it is because labor is not a part of industrial management. People don't take a sympathetic interest in the affairs of state until they are voting members of the state. You can't expect civic virtue from a disfranchised class, nor industrial virtue from the industrially disfranchised.

The labor problem, then, is at bottom the effort of wage-earners to achieve power. And that effort points, neither to insurrection nor inefficiency, but to a correction of the weakness and unimportance which make rebellion necessary and destroy an interest in work. This is what the fighting and turmoil are about. Employers will tell you that they don't mind raising wages half so much as they mind giving unions 'something to say.’ Yet 'something to say’ is just what the workers want. They know that better conditions are very elusive unless they have the power to enforce them, to see that what is given with one hand is not taken away with the other. The great battles of labor are for recognition of the union or to maintain its integrity. It happens that the great battles of American history have also been fought for independence and union.

When these prime conditions are achieved, labor's demands tend toward an increasing share of control. The right of summary discharge is the issue in many a strike. For unions will encroach more and more on matters of discipline: they are seeking to raise themselves to a partnership in the management. It is no idle guess to suppose that they will come to demand the right to choose their own foremen, perhaps to elect some of the directors, and to take not only wages, but a percentage of the profits.

It is obvious, of course, that this assumption of power cannot go to indefinite limits. There are people concerned about industry besides the workers in it. The consumers will have a control, and the state, which while it includes workers and purchasers is larger than particular groups of them, the state too will have a say about the control of industry. It is one of the immense problems of the future to adjust these conflicts and to reach some working plan. But that problem has only outlined itself dimly as yet. Labor is far from having achieved anything like its legitimate influence in the conduct of industry, and the best hope for future adjustment lies in the immense discipline that power will enforce upon the worker.

In this movement to eat into economic absolutism, very perplexing questions, of course, arise. What is the proper structure for a union? Shall it be organized by crafts, or occupations, or industries? With amalgamation or by federation? How shall the unions be governed: by representatives or by direct vote? In fact, there is hardly a problem of constitutional government which doesn't appear in acute form among the workers. And in passing, one might suggest that scholars who wish to see sovereignty in the making cannot do better than to go among the unions. They will find the initiative and referendum in constant use. They will find all phases of corruption and misrepresentation: the disappointments of indiscriminate democracy and the blight of officialism. There is a long history of bickerings over sectional interests as against national ones, home rule, devolution,? for all of these matters are, under different phrases, of course, the daily subject of union discussion.

The solutions are of very great interest to the nation. For on the capacity of labor to develop an efficient government for itself hangs the decision as to how much responsibility the unions can afford to assume. It is the development of a citizenship in industry that the labor movement has before it. It will have to work out the intricate problem of popular control in relation to technical administration. Any useful kind of industrial training, then, has got to serve this need. It is obvious that mere skill at some one process is no preparation. Nor is a generalized knowledge of industry enough. There must be added to it an understanding of what may be called the political problem of labor, the questions that arise in its efforts at self-government, in its adjustments to the world that surrounds the industry.

There is nothing simple and perfectly reassuring ahead. With wage-earners about one-tenth organized, unionism has a gigantic problem before it. And there seems to be no limit to the methods by which organization is thwarted. Race is played against race, religion against religion, there are spies, black-lists, lockouts, thugs, evictions, the denial of free speech and the right to assemble. Things are done in America today which are more lurid than melodrama. After thinking of the promise of the labor movement, you have to turn back to present realities, to that brutal struggle in West Virginia, for example, where a gatling gun mounted on a railroad car was run through a mining village at night, 'spitting bullets at the rate of two hundred and fifty a minute.’

You think of the powerful organizations ready to combat every sign of unionism, of the congestion of immigrants in the labor market, of the hostility of courts and newspapers to the preliminaries of industrial democracy. I don't know, no one knows, whether labor can realize its promise. The odds seem to be overwhelming. There is a real struggle, a trial of strength. It is not yet a matter of justice in which 'there is much to be said on both sides.’ Labor is still fighting to be admitted to the sphere of human society where it is possible to talk of adjusting difficulties. A few workers, like the skilled railroad men, have just about climbed in. But the great mass has not been made part of that world where decisions are made and policies formulated. The unions are struggling to give the wage-earners representation, and that is why the hopes of democracy are bound up with the labor movement. Bound up, not with its words and dogmas, but with the purpose which animates it. Labor needs criticism, needs inventive thought, needs advice and help. But no one can give any of these things who has not grasped with full sympathy that impulse for industrial democracy which is the key to the movement. Without this sympathy the crudity of labor is shocking, the intrigue of labor politics disgusting, the tone of labor discouraging; but with an understanding that a new interest is rising to power it is possible, I think, to find a glimmer of meaning in the bewildering intricacy of the whole matter.

The Funds of Progress

By this time, I imagine, the reader will be wondering how these modern ambitions are to be financed. For at the core of all the spiritual demands of the labor movement there is a perfectly frank desire for more wealth. The consumer attempting to pull down prices and jack up quality is making the same demand from another angle. And all through society there runs an increasing agitation for better cities, for a more attractive countryside, for enlarged schools, for health campaigns, for a thousand elements of civilization which cost money and pay in happiness. Where is this money to come from? It must come, says the radical, out of unearned wealth.

But what is unearned wealth? Rent of land, says the single taxer; the tariff tax, says the free trader; watered stock, inherited fortunes, speculative profits, monopoly prices, ? these have been named; rent, interest, and dividends, say the socialists. Most employers would point to the wages of inefficient workingmen.

There is one item of agreement: a fund of wealth exists which to-day is being diverted into the pockets of those who do no adequate service? we may call that fund the Social Surplus. It is made up of all the leaks, the useless payments, the idle demands, the inefficiency, the extortion and parasitism of industrial life. This surplus is the legitimate fund of progress.

It is quite clear that no sane man wishes to attack the economic life of a nation in any way that would make it less productive. So when editorial writers and financial experts cry out that a certain tax will ruin industry, they are making a charge which would be convincing if it were true. But the trouble is that nine times out of ten they are either dishonest or superstitious. They complain on every occasion with the slightest provocation. They have cried 'wolf’ so often that reformers don't listen any more. Business has a way of shouting before it is hurt, and pretending that the least little thing is the sack of the world. Every labor law, every business regulation, every insignificant tariff change calls forth clouds of gloom pierced by a shriek that panic is upon us. It is a pity, for the chief effect of this latent hysteria is to neutralize whatever wisdom business men have to give. Now in the years to come, we shall have to cut into the unearned surplus of industry. If it is done wisely, the attack will be confined to what is really unearned. But the opinions of business men may be no index of the truth. They will, I fear, make just as much commotion over a tax that hits the surplus as over one that hits production itself. When we attack the parasite they will say it is the tree.

Yet the modern business man is actually beginning to locate portions of the surplus. The worker who loafs is the first to catch his eye; then the inefficient worker. So business men are advocating industrial education as a way of making labor more productive. To employ a less productive worker when a more efficient one is available would be just so much waste. In large business there is a constant effort to cut down costs, and one of the vaunted achievements of the trusts has been to eliminate a host of middlemen, drawing profits for work that need not be done under a proper organization. Then too, a big item in many business houses is rent paid to a landlord. The more progressive manufacturers are beginning to wonder whether the cost of government couldn't be shifted on to these landlords, who seem to be a very unproductive class. So the single tax makes headway among business men, under the slogan 'Untax industry.’

This effort to organize out of existence the unproductive is what is meant by an attack on 'unearned’ wealth. Wherever you can substitute a machine for a man, a good worker for a poor one, a few salaried managers for an army of jobbers, you have located some of the social surplus. The trusts have been the leaders in this work. They have given us a definition of unearned income. It is a payment for an unnecessary service.

Take the case against the landlord. There are people who say that no individual has a right to own any portion of the globe. The earth belongs to all the people born on to it. But that is one of those unimpeachable sentiments which mean very little in practice. In the early days on this continent it would probably have been impossible to open up the West unless land was given away to the settler. There is no sense then in describing the economic rent some of those settlers took as unearned wealth. The case against the landlord is made out only when society has some better way of administering its natural resources. If New York City were capable of managing its land, then landlordism in New York City would have become unnecessary and parasitic. But if the city isn't capable of that task, if it can, on the other hand, spend wisely twenty per cent of the ground values, then landlordism has become twenty per cent parasitic.

Take the charge of the socialist that not only rent of land but interest on capital is unearned. Most socialists seem to imagine that interest is in its very nature a useless payment. The idea is clearly too simple for the facts. Interest would be unearned if society had devised some means of creating capital that didn't require saving by individuals. To a certain extent society has done that. For example, when a city starts to build a subway it needs capital. It can go to the bankers, but it will have to pay a very high rate of interest. It may be that the city could do its own banking and secure the money at a lower rate of interest. In that case the difference between the lower and the higher rate would represent unearned wealth. Now the time may come, I am inclined to think it is sure to come, when the government will be operating the basic industries, railroads, mines, and so forth. It will be possible then to finance government enterprise out of the profits of its industries, to eliminate interest, and substitute collective saving.

There is no blanket case against the landlord or the capitalists. The socialist contention stands or falls by men's ability to propose industrial methods which operate without the need of paying rent or interest. The landlord is an old-fashioned instrument to be superseded as fast as a less costly one can be devised. He is like the stage-coach, useless only when the railroad is possible. He is like the jobber, useless when he is no longer needed. He is like the telegraph, too costly when the wireless is possible. He is like the $100,000 man on a salary, unnecessary when better and less expensive men are ready to do the work.

This it seems to me is the way we shall locate the funds of progress. When a reform administration comes into power it generally begins by cutting out the sinecures, consolidating jobs, substituting competent for incompetent officials. The money saved can be devoted to social purposes. Well, a very capable administration does not stop there. It may eliminate the contractor, and do government work directly, and save a great deal of money in the process. If it has wider plans, it may look for new sources of wealth, as Lloyd George did in England, it may begin to tap the rent of land. Governments can eat more and more into unearned wealth by income taxes, graded drastically, by inheritance taxes on large fortunes. If these funds are spent for civilization they will not impair industry, they will on the contrary increase its efficiency. The state may encroach continuously. The question at issue always is whether the state can spend the money more wisely than the private individual. Could the government make better use of Mr. Carnegie's huge fortune than Mr. Carnegie does?? that is the problem. Are there better uses to which it might be put than those which Mr. Carnegie has in mind? If there are, then the government is entirely justified in substituting itself for Mr. Carnegie as a dispenser of libraries and peace palaces.

The more competent government becomes, the wider its outlook and the surer its method, the more surplus it will find available. The community is engaged in a competition with rich men as to which can make the better use of the nation's wealth. There is no question of inalienable rights. It is a question of good use and bad use, wise use and foolish use. When Mr. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute he did something which is wiser than most of what our government has yet shown itself capable. But when millionaires invest in ropes of pearls and flotillas of yachts they tempt the taxing power of even the most stupid government. The cry is sure to go up that all this is a proposal to destroy 'incentive.’ A debater might reply quickly that there are no end of 'incentives’ in the world to-day which ought by all means to be destroyed. But the cry would not recur so regularly were there not a genuine fear behind it. Men look at the industrial world to-day, and find that it produces enormous quantities of goods. They reason that any change would result in the production of less goods. That is the logic of their fear.

Perhaps you think I'm unjust, that worldly men could not possibly reason in so muddied a way. Well, leave the editorial writers and the speech-making bankers. Go to the orthodox economists who talk about incentive all the time. Prof. Marshall, for example, refers in one place to 'that measurement of motive which is the chief task of economic science.’ Obviously, if economics could perform such a task it would be one of the most useful sciences in the world. The art of life would have found a very solid basis if we could follow Marshall and measure 'the payment that is required to supply a sufficient incentive.’ But at no point in the whole field of political economy is the withering effect of a bad method so evident as it is in the very pages from which I am quoting. Marshall lays great stress on the measurement of motive. He says that economics leads all the other social sciences, because it deals not only with the quality of human motive but with quantity, measurable in money.

What ails that idea is that it conceals a vicious circle. Measure motive in terms of money? If a man to-day receives a hundred dollars for a piece of work, the measure of his motive is a hundred dollars. Is it? That is just what remains to be proved. If you take the money paid men to-day as a measure of motive, you assume what you started to discover. For you set out to find what you need to pay him in order to provide an incentive. You end by calling what you did pay him a measure of motive. You have begged the question completely. It is as pure a piece of sophistry as the statement that opium puts you to sleep because it is an opiate.

Supposing you set out to discover how much food a man needs in order to live. You meet a glutton and inquire about his diet. You then announce that what this glutton eats is what this glutton needs. Would you call that science? You meet an anemic person, register his diet, and announce that the food he consumes is a measure of his needs. This is literally what the orthodox economist does. He meets an economic glutton, a millionaire, and discovers that this man built a railroad, opened up new territory, and took fifty million dollars for the job. That means, says the economist, that in order to provide sufficient incentive for this magnificent enterprise fifty million dollars is required. He meets a half-starved mill-worker, who produces cloth at the rate of nine dollars a week. That proves, says the economist, that you must pay nine dollars a week for this work; to pay any more would be contrary to the principles of economics.

To say that economists measure motive in money is to say in roundabout fashion that whatever is, is necessary; then, adding insult to incompetence, to infer that whatever is, is right. Surely it is obvious as sunlight that people's incomes to-day have only a very slight relation to the 'payment that is required to supply a sufficient incentive.’ In the case of a boy who inherits eighty million dollars from a father who inherited it from the grandfather, it is clear that this income has nothing to do with incentive. Well, all through our social system these crazy anomalies occur. Unskilled labor is bought in the open market for a shabby keep and no provision for wear and tear. Competitive wages are no index of motives: they measure what a man has to take in order to live. Skilled labor does a bit better by organizing a monopoly, and fighting for higher pay. The real directors of industry are paid fixed salaries for their ability, and make fortunes 'on the side.’ Inventive genius lives from hand to mouth, and some smart person capitalizes its achievements. It pays better to own land than to cultivate it, to draw dividends than to create them. The great fortunes go to those who control the franchises, the forests, the water-powers, the mines, not to the engineers, the administrators, and the workers who are hired to use them. If I can 'corner’ the wheat supply, if I can make food scarce, if I can contrive some new fraud or stimulate some new madness in fashions, I can grow rich beyond the dreams of honest labor. Money measures incentive: there is no real relation to-day between money-making and useful work.

Power, position, pull, custom, weakness, oversupply, the class monopoly of higher education, inheritance, accident, the strategy of industrial war? these are the things which determine income? not the incentive which is necessary. The work of the world is not done because the producers get what stimulates them to their best effort. It is done under the compulsion of circumstances, grounded in habit, and the lure of big rewards is in the rarest cases a lure to human service. That is why the industrial world is capable of tremendous reorganization without impairing its efficiency. A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

Now the working class has very excellent uses for money that it can secure. It invests it directly in human life, in the food, clothing, shelter, and recreation which are its basis. So the pressure of the labor movement is a force that can make for a wiser use of wealth. If employers find that they 'cannot’ pay higher wages, their real business is not to resist labor, but to increase the efficiency of production so that they can. They will have to learn to finance industry better, they will have to eliminate the sinecures of their cousins and their uncles, they will have to scale down capitalization, and do without the hundred and one middlemen who extract a profit.

That is the only way they can meet the pressure of labor from one side and of the consumer on the other. Both of those movements are really demands for a wiser management of business. Both of them are interested in industrial efficiency. This may seem a strange thing to say in the face of labor's hostility to laborsaving devices. But the reason for the hostility is that labor at present gains very little, almost nothing, by its increased productivity. When labor and the consumer really share in industrial progress, as they will when they are powerful enough, we shall have two forces constantly at work to eliminate the parasite and abolish waste.

The commercial adventurer has no real interest in efficiency. Between useful service and some mad freak the decisive point is which will pay him the most. But consumers and workingmen are interested directly in making industry produce the greatest quantity and the best quality of goods at the least possible cost in effort. They are made poorer by money devoted to producing useless luxuries. They pay all the cost of waste, parasitism, and inefficiency. That is why tile real progress of industry is bound up intimately with their demands.

The more they press the better. I know how much this will harass the business man. But his necessity will be the mother of invention. When he finds that he faces on one side an organized labor movement, on another the organized consumer, and on another the taxing power of the state, when he is no longer able to cover waste by reducing wages or raising prices, then he will have to devote himself more and more to the real business of industrial management. He will begin to cut down his extravagant selling costs, he will have to finance his enterprise less expensively, he will have to squeeze out watered stock, he will have to scale down futile salaries, do without some of his 'side’ ventures, spend less time on the stock market, and give the best of his thought to coordinating the industry.

These necessities will be the opportunity of the business man with a scientific training. Already we are beginning to see that in the light of its possibilities, industry to-day is inconceivably wasteful. The raw product is won from the earth, it is transported hundreds of miles over expensive railroads, it passes through ten or twenty different manipulators, is manufactured, and passes again through an infinitely complicated series of operations to the ultimate consumer. The great water-power resources of this country are said to be not one-seventh developed. Yet their primary power alone 'exceeds our entire mechanical power in use, would operate every mill, drive every spindle, propel every train and boat, and light every city, town, and village in the country.’ Coal burned on the American locomotive is estimated by the Railway Age Gazette to be only 45% efficient. The whole conservation movement in its infinite ramifications is an answer to the pressing demmands that people are making upon industry. So far in America we have been spendthrifts with our resources, letting coal lie half mined, skinning the forests, and obtaining by agriculture a yield that shames us in the eyes of the European farmer.

The wealth exists to pay for democracy. Our dreams are not idle. We are not a poor people who need fill our minds with gorgeous and impossible visions. Labor can go ahead with its demands, the consumer with his, we can enter upon social works to transform our sooty life into something more worthy of our dignity. There are huge wastes to be eliminated, parasitic incomes to be cut off, large classes of people to be turned from useless into useful effort, great inventions to be utilized. But these things will be done only if there is constant pressure on the industrial system from those who work in it and live by it.

A Nation of Villagers

It has been said that no trust could have been created without breaking the law. Neither could astronomy in the time of Galileo. If you build up foolish laws and insist that invention is a crime, well? then it is a crime. That is undeniably true, but not very interesting. Of course, you can't possibly treat the trusts as crimes. First of all, nobody knows what the trust laws mean. The spectacle of an enlightened people trying in vain for twenty-five years to find out the intention of a statute that it has enacted? that is one of those episodes that only madmen can appreciate. You see, it is possible to sympathize with the difficulties of a scholar trying to decipher the hieroglyphics of some ancient people, but when statesmen can't read the things they've written themselves, it begins to look as if some imp had been playing pranks. The men who rule this country to-day were all alive, and presumably sane, when the Sherman Act was passed. They all say in public that it is a great piece of legislation? an 'exquisite instrument’ someone called it the other day. The highest paid legal intelligence has concentrated on the Act. The Supreme Court has interpreted it many times, ending with the enormous assumption that reason had something to do with the law. The Supreme Court was denounced for this: the reformers said that if there was any reason in the law, the devil himself had got hold of it. As I write, Congress is engaged in trying to define what it thinks it means by the Act.

That uncertainty hasn't prevented a mass of indictments, injunctions, lawsuits. It has, if anything, invited them. But of course, you can't enforce the criminal law against every 'unfair’ business practice. Just try to imagine the standing army of inspectors, detectives, prosecutors, and judges, the city of courthouses and jails, the enormous costs, and the unremitting zeal? if you cannot see the folly, at least see the impossibility of the method. To work with it seriously would not only bring business to a standstill, it would drain the energy of America more thoroughly than the bitterest foreign war. Visualize life in America, if you can, when the government at Washington and forty-eight state governments really undertook not our present desultory pecking, but a systematic enforcement of the criminal law. The newspapers would enjoy it for a week, and everybody would be excited; in two weeks it would be a bore; in six, there would be such a revolt that everyone, radical and conservative, would be ready to wreck the government and hang the attorney-general. For these 'criminal’ practices are so deep in the texture of our lives; they affect so many, their results are so intimate that anything like a 'surgical’ cutting at evil would come close to killing the patient.
If the anti-trust people really grasped the full meaning of what they said, and if they really had the power or the courage to do what they propose, they would be engaged in one of the most destructive agitations that America has known. They would be breaking up the beginning of a collective organization, thwarting the possibility of cooperation, and insisting upon submitting industry to the wasteful, the planless scramble of little profiteers. They would make impossible any deliberate and constructive use of our natural resources, they would thwart any effort to form the great industries into coordinated services, they would preserve commercialism as the undisputed master of our lives, they would lay a premium on the strategy of industrial war,? they would, if they could. For these anti-trust people have never seen the possibilities of organized industries. They have seen only the obvious evils, the birth-pains, the undisciplined strut of youth, the bad manners, the greed, and the trickery. The trusts have been ruthless, of course. No one tried to guide them; they have broken the law in a thousand ways, largely because the law was such that they had to.

At any rate, I should not like to answer before a just tribunal for the harm done this country in the last twenty-five years by the stupid hostility of anti-trust laws. How much they have perverted the constructive genius of this country it is impossible to estimate. They have blocked any policy of welcome and use, they have concentrated a nation's thinking on inessentials, they have driven creative business men to underhand methods, and put a high money value on intrigue and legal cunning, demagoguery and waste. The trusts have survived it all, but in mutilated form, the battered make-shifts of a trampled promise. They have learned every art of evasion? the only art reformers allowed them to learn.
It is said that the economy of trusts is unreal. Yet no one has ever tried the economies of the trust in any open, deliberate fashion. The amount of energy that has had to go into repelling stupid attack, the adjustments that had to be made underground? -it is a wonder the trusts achieved what they did to bring order out of chaos, and forge an instrument for a nation's business. You have no more right to judge the trusts by what they are than to judge the labor movement by what it is. Both of them are in that preliminary state where they are fighting for existence, and any real outburst of constructive effort has been impossible for them.

But revolutions are not stopped by blind resistance. They are only perverted. And as an exhibition of blind resistance to a great promise, the trust campaign of the American democracy is surely unequalled. Think of contriving correctives for a revolution, such as ordering business men to compete with each other. It is as if we said: 'Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth; let thy rigbt hand fight thy left hand, and in the name of God let neither win.’ Bernard Shaw remarked several years ago that 'after all, America is not submitting to the Trusts without a struggle. The first steps have already been taken by the village constable. He is no doubt preparing a new question for immigrants’ · . . after asking them whether they are anarchists or polygamists, he is to add 'Do you approve of Trusts?’ but pending this supreme measure of national defense he has declared in several states that trusts will certainly be put in the stocks and whipped.’

There has been no American policy on the trust question: there has been merely a widespread resentment. The small local competitors who were wiped out became little centers of bad feeling: these nationally organized industries were looked upon as foreign invaders. They were arrogant, as the English in Ireland or the Germans in Alsace, and much of the feeling for local democracy attached itself to the revolt against these national despotisms. The trusts made enemies right and left: they squeezed the profits of the farmer, they made life difficult for the shopkeeper, they abolished jobbers and travelling salesmen, they closed down factories, they exercised an enormous control over credit through their size and through their eastern connections. Labor was no match for them, state legislatures were impotent before them. They came into the life of the simple American community as a tremendous revolutionary force, upsetting custom, changing men's status, demanding a readjustment for which people were unready. Of course, there was anti-trust feeling; of course, there was a blind desire to smash them. Men had been ruined and they were too angry to think, too hard pressed to care much about the larger life which the trusts suggested.

This feeling came to a head in Bryan's famous 'cross of gold’ speech in 1896. 'When you come before us and tell us that we shall disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your action .... The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employers. The attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis. The merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York. The farmer ...is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain. The miners ...It is for these that we speak ...we are fighting in the defense of our homes, our families, and posterity.’ What Bryan was really defending was the old and simple life of America, a life that was doomed by the great organization that had come into the world. He thought he was fighting the plutocracy: as a matter of fact he was fighting something much deeper than that; he was fighting the larger scale of human life. The Eastern money power controlled the new industrial system, and Bryan fought it. But what he and his people hated from the bottom of their souls were the economic conditions which had upset the old life of the prairies, made new demands upon democracy, introduced specialization and science, had destroyed village loyalties, frustrated private ambitions, and created the impersonal relationships of the modern world.

Bryan has never been able to adjust himself to the new world in which he lives. That is why he is so irresistibly funny to sophisticated newspaper men. His virtues, his habits, his ideas, are the simple, direct, shrewd qualities of early America. He is the true Don Quixote of our politics, for he moves in a world that has ceased to exist.

He is a more genuine conservative than some propertied bigot. Bryan stands for the popular tradition of America, whereas most of his enemies stand merely for the power that is destroying that tradition. Bryan is what America was; his critics are generally defenders of what America has become. And neither seems to have any vision of what America is to be. Yet there has always been great power behind Bryan, the power of those who in one way or another were hurt by the greater organization that America was developing. The Populists were part of that power. La Follette and the insurgent Republicans expressed it. It was easily a political majority of the American people. The Republican Party disintegrated under the pressure of the revolt. The Bull Moose gathered much of its strength from it. The Socialists have got some of it. But in 1912 it swept the Democratic Party, and by a combination of circumstances, carried the country. The plutocracy was beaten in politics, and the power that Bryan spoke for in 1896, the forces that had made muckraking popular, captured the government. They were led by a man who was no part of the power that he represented.

Woodrow Wilson is an outsider capable of skilled interpretation. He is an historian, and that has helped him to know the older tradition of America. He is a student of theory, and like most theorists of his generation he is deeply attached to the doctrines that swayed the world when America was founded.

But Woodrow Wilson at least knows that there is a new world. 'There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago. We are in the presence of a new organization of society .... We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life.’ You could not make a more sweeping statement of the case. The President is perfectly aware of what has happened, and he says at the very outset that 'our laws still deal with us on the basis of the old system ...the old positive formulas do not fit the present problems.’

You wait eagerly for some new formula. The new formula is this: 'I believe the time has come when the governments of this country, both state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely and carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of life.’ Now that is a new formula, because it means a willingness to use the power of government much more extensively.

But for what purpose is this power to be used? There, of course, is the rub. It is to be used to 'restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in what concerns us only as families and individuals, to its purity, its self-respect, and its pristine strength and freedom.’ The ideal is the old ideal, the ideal of Bryan, the method is the new one of government interference.

That, I believe, is the inner contradiction of Woodrow Wilson. He knows that there is a new world demanding new methods, but he dreams of an older world. He is torn between the two. It is a very deep conflict in him between what he knows and what he feels.

His feeling is, as he says, for 'the man on the make.’ 'For my part, I want the pigmy to have a chance to come out’ ...'Just let some of the youngsters I know have a chance and they'll give these gentlemen points. Lend them a little money. They can't get any now. See to it that when they have got a local market they can't be squeezed out of it.’ Nowhere in his speeches will you find any sense that it may be possible to organize the fundamental industries on some deliberate plan for national service. He is thinking always about somebody's chance to build up a profitable business; he likes the idea that somebody can beat somebody else, and the small business man takes on the virtues of David in a battle with Goliath.

'Have you found trusts that thought as much of their men as they did of their machinery?’ he asks, forgetting that few people have ever found competitive textile mills or clothing factories that did. There isn't an evil of commercialism that Wilson isn't ready to lay at the door of the trusts. He becomes quite reckless in his denunciation of the New Devil—Monopoly—and of course, by contrast the competitive business takes on a halo of light. It is amazing how clearly he sees the evils that trusts do, how blind he is to the evils that his supporters do. You would think that the trusts were the first oppressors of labor; you would think they were the first business organization that failed to achieve the highest possible efficiency. The pretty record of competition throughout the Nineteenth Century is forgotten. Suddenly all that is a glorious past which we have lost. You would think that competitive commercialism was really a generous, chivalrous, high-minded stage of human culture.

'We design that the limitations on private enterprise shall be removed, so that the next generation of youngsters, as they come along, will not have to become proteges of benevolent trusts, but will be free to go about making their own lives what they will; so that we shall taste again the full cup, not of charity, but of liberty,? the only wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit of a people.’ That cup of liberty? we may well ask him to go back to Manchester, to Paterson to-day, to the garment trades of New York, and taste it for himself.

The New Freedom means the effort of small business men and farmers to use the government against the larger collective organization of industry. Wilson's power comes from them; his feeling is with them; his thinking is for them. Never a word of understanding for the new type of administrator, the specialist, the professionally trained business man; practically no mention of the consumer? even the tariff is for the business man; no understanding of the new demands of labor, its solidarity, its aspiration for some control over the management of business; no hint that it may be necessary to organize the fundamental industries of the country on some definite plan so that our resources may be developed by scientific method instead of by men 'on the make’; no friendliness for the larger, collective life upon which the world is entering, only a constant return to the commercial chances of young men trying to set up in business. That is the push and force of this New Freedom, a freedom for the little profiteer, but no freedom for the nation from the narrowness, the poor incentives, the limited vision of small competitors,? no freedom from clamorous advertisement, from wasteful selling, from duplication of plants, from unnecessary enterprise, from the chaos, the welter, the strategy of industrial war.

There is no doubt, I think, that President Wilson and his party represent primarily small business in a war against the great interests. Socialists speak of his administration as a revolution within the bounds of capitalism. Wilson doesn't really fight the oppressions of property. He fights the evil done by large property-holders to small ones. The temper of his administration was revealed very clearly when the proposal was made to establish a Federal Trade Commission. It was suggested at once by leading spokesmen of the Democratic Party that corporations with a capital of less than a million dollars should be exempted from supervision. Is that because little corporations exploit labor or the consumer less? Not a bit of it. It is because little corporations are in control of the political situation.

But there are certain obstacles to the working out of the New Freedom. First of all, there was a suspicion in Wilson's mind, even during the campaign, that the tendency to large organization was too powerful to be stopped by legislation. So he left open a way of escape from the literal achievement of what the New Freedom seemed to threaten. 'I am for big business,’ he said, 'and 1 am against the trusts.’ That is a very subtle distinction, so subtle, I suspect, that no human legislation will ever be able to make it. The distinction is this: big business is a business that has survived competition; a trust is an arrangement to do away with competition. But when competition is done away with, who is the Solomon wise enough to know whether the result was accomplished by superior efficiency or by agreement among the competitors or by both?

The big trusts have undoubtedly been built up in part by superior business ability, and by successful competition, but also by ruthless competition, by underground arrangements, by an intricate series of facts which no earthly tribunal will ever be able to disentangle. And why should it try? These great combinations are here. What interests us is not their history but their future. The point is whether you are going to split them up, and if so into how many parts. Once split, are they to be kept from coming together again? Are you determined to prevent men who could cooperate from cooperating? Wilson seems to imply that a big business which has survived competition is to be let alone, and the trusts attacked. But as there is no real way of distinguishing between them, he leaves the question just where he found it: he must choose between the large organization of business and the small.

It's here that his temperament and his prejudices clash with fact and necessity. He really would like to disintegrate large business. 'Are you not eager for the time,’ he asks, 'when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming not employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful business ...?’ But to what percentage of the population can he hold out that hope? How many small but hopeful steel mills, coal mines, telegraph systems, oil refineries, copper mines, can this country support? A few hundred at the outside. And for these few hundred sons whose 'best energies · . . are inspired by the knowledge that they are their own masters with the paths of the world before them,’ we are asked to give up the hope of a sane, deliberate organization of national industry brought under democratic control.

I submit that it is an unworthy dream. I submit that the intelligent men of my generation can find a better outlet for their energies than in making themselves masters of little businesses. They have the vast opportunity of introducing order and purpose into the business world, of devising administrative methods by which the great resources of the country can be operated on some thought-out plan. They have the whole new field of industrial statesmanship before them, and those who prefer the egotism of some little business are not the ones whose ambitions we need most to cultivate.

But the disintegration which Wilson promised in the New Freedom is not likely to be carried out. One year of public office has toned down the audacity of the campaign speeches so much that Mr. Dooley says you can play the President's messages on a harp. Instead of a 'radical reconstruction’ we are engaged in signing a 'constitution of peace.’ These big business men who a few months ago showed not the 'least promise of disinterestedness’ are to-day inspired by 'a spirit of accommodation.’ The President's own Secretary of Commerce, Mr. Redfield, has said to the National Chamber of Commerce that the number of trusts still operating 'is conspicuously small.’ Was ever wish the father to a pleasanter thought? Was ever greater magic wrought with less effort? Or is it that politicians in office have to pretend that what they can't do has happened anyway?

Wilson is against the trusts for many reasons: the political economy of his generation was based on competition and free trade; the Democratic Party is by tradition opposed to a strong central government, and that opposition applies equally well to strong national business,? it is a party attached to local rights, to village patriotism, to humble but ambitious enterprise; its temper has always been hostile to specialization and expert knowledge, because it admires a very primitive man-to-man democracy. Wilson's thought is inspired by that outlook. It has been tempered somewhat by contact with men who have outgrown the village culture, so that Wilson is less hostile to experts, less oblivious to administrative problems than is Bryan. But at the same time his speeches are marked with contempt for the specialist: they play up quite obviously to the old democratic notion that any man can do almost any job. You have always to except the Negro, of course, about whom the Democrats have a totally different tradition. But among white men, special training and expert knowledge are somewhat under suspicion in Democratic circles.

Hostility to large organization is a natural quality in village life. Wilson is always repeating that the old personal relationships of employer and employee have disappeared. He deplores the impersonal nature of the modern world. Now that is a fact not to be passed over lightly. It does change the nature of our problems enormously. Indeed, it is just this breakdown of the old relationships which constitutes the modern problem. So the earlier chapters of this book were devoted to showing how in response to new organization the psychology of business men had changed; how the very nature of property had been altered; how the consumer has had to develop new instruments for controlling the market, and how labor is compelled to organize its power in order not to be trodden by gigantic economic forces.

Nobody likes the present situation very much. But where dispute arises is over whether we can by legislation return to a simpler and more direct stage of civilization. Bryan really hopes to do that, Wilson does too, but his mind is too critical not to have some doubts, and that is why he is against trusts but not against big business. But there is a growing body of opinion which says that communication is blotting out village culture, and opening up national and international thought. It says that bad as big business is to-day, it has a wide promise within it, and that the real task of our generation is to realize it. It looks to the infusion of scientific method, the careful application of administrative technique, the organization and education of the consumer for control, the discipline of labor for an increasing share of the management. Those of us who hold such a belief are pushed from behind by what we think is an irresistible economic development, and lured by a future which we think is possible.
We don't imagine that the trusts are going to drift naturally into the service of human life. We think they can be made to serve it if the American people compel them. We think that the American people may be able to do that if they can adjust their thinking to a new world situation, if they apply the scientific spirit to daily life, and if they can learn to cooperate on a large scale. Those, to be sure, are staggering ifs. The conditions may never be fulfilled entirely. But in so far as they are not fulfilled we shall drift along at the mercy of economic forces that we are unable to master. Those who cling to the village view of life may deflect the drift, may batter the trusts about a bit, but they will never dominate business, never humanize its machinery, and they will continue to be the playthings of industrial change.

At bottom the issue is between those who are willing to enter upon an effort for which there is no precedent, and those who aren't. In a real sense it is an adventure. We have still to explore the new scale of human life which machinery has thrust upon us. We have still to invent ways of dealing with it. We have still to adapt our abilities to immense tasks. Of course, men shudder and beg to be let off in order to go back to the simpler life for which they were trained. Of course, they hope that competition will automatically produce the social results they desire. Of course, they see all the evils of the trust and none of its promise. They can point to the failure of empires and the success of little cities. They can say that we are obliterating men in the vast organizations we are permitting.

But they are not the only people who realize that man as he is today is not big enough to master the modern world. It is this realization which has made men speculate on the development of what they call a 'collective mind.’ They hope that somehow we shall develop intelligence larger than the individual.

I see no evidence for that. There are no minds but human minds so far as our problems go. It seems to me that this notion of a collective mind over and above men and women is simply a myth created to meet difficulties greater than men and women are as yet capable of handling. It is a deus ex rnachina invented to cover an enormous need,? a hope that something outside ourselves will do our work for us. It would be infinitely easier if such a power existed. But I can't see any ground for relying upon it. We shall have, it seems to me, to develop within men and women themselves the power they need. It is an immense ambition, and each man who approaches it must appear presumptuous. But it is the problem of our generation: to analyze the weakness, to attack the obstacles, to search for some of the possibilities, to realize if we can the kind of effort by which we can face the puzzling world in which we live.