manufacturers control over the home market. This fact of the control of the home market was of supreme importance for the future evolution of the machine process in America. For it has been well said, "The main land of the United States is the largest area in the civilized world which is thus unrestricted by customs (duties), excises or national pre,udice, and its population possesses, because of its great collective wealth, a larger consuming capacity than that of any other nation". Supported by this vast home market, machine industry in this country laid the basis broad and deep for the vast industrial system of the present. Without it "big business" would be impossible.

The keynote of American industrial evolution from 1880 to the present has been combination and centralization. Slowly the single-entrepreneur organization, the partnership and the joint stock company have given place to the corporation. Thirty per cent of all manufacturing plants are now operated as corporations; 80 per cent of the manufactured products of the country come from corporations. In some lines of manufacture such as steel, gas, lead, oil products, sugar, meat, and woolen goods the control of the corporation is practically absolute. But the concentration in the form of corporate business enterprise in production is only one phase of the general tendency to concentrate. Concentration of production has brought concentration of population in cities and industrial districts. There is the same tendency to concentrate in transportation facilities, both by rail and water, and in the means of communication as in the telephone and the telegraph. Concentration in high finance led to the appointment of a Congressional committee "to investigate the concentration of control of money and credit". Concentration of wealth has reached the stage where 2 per cent of the population own 60 per cent of the wealth of the country. Concentration in other phases of modern life have come for the most part, however, as corollaries of concentration in business. For the concentration of private control of industrial activities through trusts, pools, holding companies, in

terlocking directorates, or otherwise has now become the order of the day. Great corporations such as the Standard Oil or the United States Steel extend their lines of business enterprise far beyond oil and steel and control numerous smaller concerns more or less remotely connected industrially.

This large scale combination is made possible in manufacturing through the control and organization of a tariff-protected home market, the development and combination of railroads, the standardizing of machinery, scientific methods and management, and increased facilities for communication such as the telephone and typewriter. The advantages of combination are the introduction of improved and expensive machinery, the elimination of waste through the use of by-products, easier solution of the problem of labor, easier handling of raw materials and marketing of the finished product. The causes of large-scale combination are to be sought in the social conditions peculiar to the last few decades, namely, the preemption of natural resources and decreased opportunity for speculative gains of the old type, the business risks connected with the mastery of world-markets now opening up, the intensity of competition due to narrowing opportunities, the profits made possible through a large-scale and standardized production of necessities such as gas, ice, oil, steel, meat, tobacco, or sugar, the possibilities of increasing profits through overcapitalization, and finally a high tariff. According to Mr. Havemeyer of the sugar trust, in his testimony before the Industrial Commission, the tariff was a direct incentive to the formations of most of the combinations previous to 1900.

It is apparently a far cry from our modern highly mutualized and corporate life, "the Great Society" of Mr. Wallas, to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England towards the close of the eighteenth century. But it should be evident from this sketch that the connection is a very real one. It is evident, furthermore, that the movement in the last stage of which we are now living includes far more than the application of certain inventions in the textile industry. The discovery

and application of the vast technology of the machine process to the satisfaction of human needs has given rise to the philosophy of the machine process which gradually has wrought itself into the spirit of our institutions, altered fundamentally our way of life, undermined our theories in economics and politics, and invalidated time-honored beliefs in ethics and religion. It took Europe several generations to absorb the great doctrines of the French Revolution. After the lapse of a century we are just becoming aware of the implications and applications of the Industrial Revolution for modern life.

Broadly speaking, the problem created by the rise of the Great Society is one of adjusting the political and ethical traditions inherited from the eighteenth century and accentuated by long contact with a frontier community to a way of life shaped by large-scale manufacture, the big city, organized labor, and world-federations. We have to ask whether the traditional norms underlying home, school, church, and state provide us with adequate solutions for the problems of to-day. Back of those norms lie generations of social experience under a simple agricultural régime that was essentially individualistic. It knew no system of complicated prices, no mysterious markets, no profiteering middle man. The relations of employer and employee were direct, intimate, personal, and regulated by time-honored customs. The worker was identified with a definite community and did not wander from city to city or state to state like the industrial nomads that harvest the western crops. In every sphere of life, industrial, social, religious, or political, authoritative norms inherited from the past and firmly fixed in public sentiment cemented the various groups into one organic whole. The child in the home, the apprentice in the shop, the laborer on the farm did not have it in their power to stray far from the path of social rectitude. The body of authoritative social standards hedged in the individual and presented to him at birth final solutions of many of those great problems of life which to-day each faces single-handed and alone.

The Great Society with its vast urban agglomerates, its

impersonal pecuniary measures of values, its mad struggle for profits, its unprecedented industrial and financial combinations made possible by the machine process, presents a human drama different in a thousand ways from the simple agricultural community of the past. It is impersonal in its relations, quantitative in its measure of values, highly mutualized, and interdependent. But the sentiments of men and women are still organized for the most part in terms of the old individualistic régime. The doctrine of individual salvation is still sung in our hymns and preached from the pulpit; in business we still insist upon unrestricted competition, freedom of contract and property as a natural right; in politics the individualistic laissez faire democracy of Jefferson and Jackson is still popular; in education we are hardly able yet to conceive of culture except in terms of the privileged and caste atmosphere of the college of colonial days. The spiritual poverty together with the complexity of the Great Society seem to threaten it with moral bankruptcy.

83. THE TRAITS OF THE GREAT SOCIETY AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE CORPORATION

What, in general, are the characteristics of our modern industrial order, the Great Society of to-day? First, it must be observed that the Great Society is international rather than national. In spite of differences in race, creed, language, or tariff restrictions, the great nations of Christendom constitute one vast industrial whole. To be sure, ideal values embalmed in art, literature, law, science, and religion have always united America and the nations of western Europe in one common civilization. But the war has only brought out the more clearly the extent to which community of interests had been intensified by the discipline of the Great Society. The unity which Rome first achieved, which was perpetuated in sublimated form by the medieval Church, now bids fair to be permanently secured through the implications and applications of the machine process.

Again the Great Society is characterized by greater mo

bility than any other period of the world's history. The highest efficiency in the working of the new industrial order means not merely freedom in the choosing of callings and the adaptation of talents within any national group. There is necessary also great fluidity among populations and in the functioning of capital. For the exigencies of the modern industrial order require something approximating the internationalization of both capital and labor so that they may flow where they are needed for the accomplishment of the world's work. Similarly trade is opposed in spirit to all artificial barriers and seeks naturally the international point of view.

Finally, the Great Society is both materialistic and idealistic. Viewed from the standpoint of the machine, we are restricted to a philosophy of physical energy, quantitative standardization of values and a mechanistic and deterministic conception of the world. Furthermore, ours is preeminently a pecuniary civilization. Profits are the driving force of the vast colossus of business and the pecuniary obligation is possibly the one form of the ought that is best understood and obeyed by every class of Americans. On the other hand, in no civilization known to history is the humanistic note so prominent and the confidence in man's powers so strong. One looks in vain for any element of otherworldliness in our militant industrialism. The gospel of the modern order, namely, "prosperity","social welfare", may not occupy a high spiritual level but it is robustious, humanistic, and passionately devoted to the things of this world. There is behind our efforts for child welfare, conservation, or prohibition, a vital and compelling belief in a better world yet to be. But this is not the idealism of the dreamer or the mystic. It is an idealism of action. For it seeks through strenuous and unremittent struggle with the problem of the moment to make clear to itself the goal of endeavor. The American people, who more than any other have incarnated the spirit of the Great Society, are the chief representatives of this idealism of action.

It is in the corporation that we find best reflected the spirit of the Great Society for, as we have seen, the corporation