mechanism; and all the civilized peoples are suffering privation together because their general staff of industrial experts are in this way required to take orders and submit to sabotage at the hands of the statesmen and the vested interests. Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias.
No doubt this characterization of the
industrial system and its besetting tribulations will seem
overdrawn. However, it is not intended to
apply to any date earlier than the twentieth
century, or to any backward community that still lies
outside the sweep of the mechanical industry.
Only gradually during the past century, while the
mechanical industry has progressively been taking
over the production of goods and services, and
going over to quantity production, has the
industrial system taken on this character of an inclusive
organization of interlocking processes and
interchange of materials; and it is only in the twentieth.
century that this cumulative progression has come
to a head with such effect that this
characterization is now visibly becoming true. And even now
