of nature will assume new meanings and ends, for it will be seen by new senses of interpretation. With our present individual knowledge, we cannot conceive it; or, if we could, we would not believe it possible.

Who is there wise enough to predict what will result after "World Corporation" has been launched, after the people realize what its success will mean, what the outcome will be? Who can foresee to what degree of enthusiasm the people will rise in their desire and hope for emancipation! Man is emotional, and quickly carried forward upon waves of popular excitement; and it is these great tidal waves of emotion that mark the revolutionary changes throughout history. The gradual growth of a thought, an idea which has within it a germ of human progress, finds its culmination in emotion, and change is brought about quickly and decisively.

The thought that humanity is on the borderland of a new system, a new epoch-making period of the world's history, is spreading from mind to mind, and rapidly changing preconceived ideas of life and man's relation to man and to nature. The fever of excitement is already beginning to course through the veins, and only waits on conviction to burst into flame.

The elimination of competition by the centralization of industry into Corporations and Trusts, and its resulting economies, has set the individual to thinking. He begins to doubt his old belief that competition is necessary to progress; he asks himself questions and seeks the answers in his own mind, and, when these answers are not forthcoming, he asks others. Discussions are heard on every hand in regard to corporations and trusts, and newspapers and magazines are largely devoted to this same subject. All are asking: What is the outcome of this evolution that is taking place? What is a Corporation? What is a Trust? Are they not miniature corporate governments of capital and individuals? And gradually the thought begins to dawn-the thought which is going to rise to a culminating point within the next few years, and carry men off their feet; which will crowd out every selfish idea-THE THOUGHT THAT THE EMANCIPATION OF THE HUMAN RACE IS IN OUR HANDS. By a single stroke humanity can change a system of extravagance, disorder, injustice, and crime into one of order, equity, and virtue. Nothing stands in the way; for where is there any difference between the control of a part of industry by a few individuals and the control of all industry by all? This is the thought that will be acted upon; this is the thought that will make men forget self and pour their minds and wealth with equal prodigality into the treasury of "World Corporation."

Enthusiasm is the foundation of power which centralizes force and destroys every barrier between itself and its purpose. It makes an army out of scattered parts. It leads to "World Corporation."

379. A New Earth35

BY L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY

It would be a great pity if anyone were to imagine that the changes necessary to secure the just reward of all forms of labor are either difficult to effect or likely to cause dislocation in the making. The greater number of our industrial concerns are already shaped in the form of limited liability companies, the shareholders in which are dumb, while the management is in the hands of paid officials. The reform which needs to be effected is to substitute the community at large for the dumb shareholders. Management, ability, invention, would be properly rewarded, as they are now rewarded in some cases, and as they are not now rewarded in many cases. The only change would be the gradual substitution of the community for the shareholders, and the consequent disappearance of unearned incomes. Such portions of the product as were necessary for application as new capital would be so applied by the community. For the rest, the whole of the product would go to labor. Saving, the necessary saving, without which labor would go without tools, would be simply and automatically effected, and capital would take its true and rightful place as the handmaiden of labor.

Let us not go farther without a vision and a hope. That vision, that hope, is not of a regimented society, but of a community relieved from nine-tenths of its present irksome routine and carking care. If the individual is to be set free it can only be in a society so organized as to reduce the labor employed in the production of common necessities to a minimum. The minimum cannot be secured without the organization of each of the great branches of production and distribution. Common needs can be satisfied with little labor if labor be properly applied. The work of a few will feed a hundred or supply exquisite cloth for the clothing of fifty. The work for a few hours per day of every adult member of the community will be ample to supply every comfort in each season to all. Thus set free, the lives of men will turn to the uplifting, individual work which is the pride of every craftsman. The dwellings of men will contain not only the socialized products within common reach, but the proud individual achievements of their inmates. The Adapted from Riches and Poverty, 324-329. Published by Methuen & Co. (1905).

35

simple and beautiful clothing of the community will chiefly be made of fabrics woven in the socialized factories, but it will often be worked by the loving hands of women. A happy union of labor economized in routine work and labor lavished upon individual work will uplift the crafts of the future and the character of those who follow them. The abominations of machine-made ornament will disappear, and art be wedded to everyday life. Each new invention to save labor in mining, or tilling, or building, or spinning, will be hailed with joy as a release from toil and a gift of more time in which to do individual work.

The inventor, the originator, now unhappily compelled to hunt for a capitalist and bow low his genius before some individual distinguished only for that gift of acquisitiveness, that business ability, which is the lowest attribute of mankind, will see his idea put to the test and reap not unholy gains but the honor of his fellows if it is not found wanting. The painter, no longer compelled to paint portraits of the rich and not necessarily beautiful, will ally his gifts with the common life of men and be carried in triumph before the enduring monuments of his genius. The organizer, the man of arrangement, will be invited to exercise his talent, not in overreaching and despoiling his fellows, but in planning their welfare in a thousand new schemes of development.

No host of wasteful workers will be found in the industrial camp. Accounts will be simple and clerks few. No travelers, agents, or touts will be needed to push doubtful commodities. The sham and the substitute will be found only in museums. It will be obviously ridiculous to employ any but good materials, for labor can only be economized by producing the things which are the best of their kind. Policies of insurance, those typical documents of a community of prey, will be read in the public archives with much the same feeling as we now read a warrant for the burning of a Bruno. The young men who now waste their time in ruling up books in banks and insurance offices or in serving writs will find manly and useful work. The production of commodities will be commensurate with the labor put forth, unemployment will be one of the few crimes known to the statute-book, and last, but not least, the economic dependence of woman will cease.

The attainment of such ends will only be difficult as long as we refuse to apply scientific methods to the ordering of common affairs. It is in the domain of politics alone that men refuse to apply first principles to the solution of problems. The mental daring which has accomplished so much in engineering, in astronomy, in

surgery, in every department of science, is replaced in the sphere of politics by a timorous tinkering with admitted evils. With things the scientist has worked marvels in a single century. With those marvels the politician has done little. The scientist has applied his skill to locomotion; the politician has refused to avail himself of that skill in order to distribute the population healthily. The scientist has stated the conditions of health; the politician has refused to create those conditions. The scientist has supplied the tools; the politician has neglected to take them up.

The problem of riches and poverty is of the simplest. It presents none of the difficulties which attach to the measurement of the mass of the sun, or the treatment of such a disease as cancer. Science has presented us with such instruments that we can easily create a tremendous superfluity of commodities if we choose to do so. We know how to produce; we know how to transport the results of our production. The appliances at our command could furnish many more foot-tons of work than are needed to give proper housing, suitable clothing and good food to every unit of the community. There is here no impenetrable secret; we have read enough in the book of Nature to control her forces to effect; our power of production is not too small, but already greater than our need. If invention went no farther, if science now came to a standstill, we should have tools more than adequate to abolish poverty.

Unfortunately the politicians and the economists have never discussed the question of poverty from this point of view. Volumes have been written on such subjects as "rent," "interest," or "value,” but nothing has been done to enquire how much work is needed to feed, clothe and house a community, and how best that work may be accomplished. In designing an engine, the man of science considers the work to be done and the known means to do it. For want of that agreement and determination, for want, that is, of a wise collectivism, the greater number of our people are poor. It is a world of service which a civilization would substitute for a world of serfdom and pain. But if, realizing that the world has no room for the idle, the people would rise to a freedom only bounded by the knowledge of and necessity for collective decision, then there is the broadest avenue for hope and the clearest call to action. The achievements of those who are gone, these are the inheritance of the people. The only true riches of the nation, men and women, these are the people themselves. The people have but to will it, and we set our faces toward a civilization.

I. ECONOMICS AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

380. Wanted: A New Symbolism3

BY ALVIN S. JOHNSON

The aristocracies have vanished, we shall never know them again. The work of supplying the world, now and for the future, has become one of such complexity, requiring so broad a diffusion of general intelligence, that merely personal dignitaries can never again acquire their ancient influence over man's mind, their ancient hold on his conduct. There remains in the world only the common

Differences in natural endowment, in culture and in wealth persist; but these can not alter the fact of a fundamental democracy. So far as we serve, we serve the common man.

But-and this we must fix in our minds—the common man of today is not the obscure citizen of earlier epochs. The same commercial process which has broken down the earlier class organization has produced a differentiation in economic structure, an interdependence of parts, which compels us to conceive of economic society as a living organism. The common man of today compares with his prototype of yesterday as the cell in an organized tissue compares with the cell in the half-coherent mass of protoplasm. The functions of the individual are now organic functions, far transcending the narrow confines of his own personality. The pilot, the engineer, the steel worker, the coal-heaver, are significant, not in themselves, but in the social work they perform. With the progress of time, a constantly increasing share of the population assumes functions essentially social.

In serving the common man, then, we are performing a work far more worth while than that of supplying the needs of an individual, of whatever personal worth. We are serving a social functionary in the last analysis, society itself. Our work, then, is significant or meaningless according as we conceive society itself as worthy or not. If we are constrained to think of our society as ninety million persons, chiefly knaves and fools, the service will be irksome, to be shirked, if possible. If the society we serve is full of brutality and injustice, disfigured with poverty and ignorance, corrupted with cynicism and self-indulgence, it can not inspire us with loyalty in its service. The exhausting toil of the long day, the hopeless misery of the sweatshop, the sordid depravity of the slum, can not much longer cumber the earth if society is to command the best efforts

36 Adapted from "An Ethical Aspect of the New Industrialism," in the South Atlantic Quarterly, XII, 9-11. Copyright (1912).