Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF INDUSTRY It is admitted by all that great changes are coming in the industrial order. The catastrophe which has befallen the world in the war, as the British Labor Party's pronouncement of December, 1917, well says, if not the death of European civilization itself, is at any rate the culmination and collapse of a distinctively industrial civilization. The old economic system has practically broken down on our hands and is in disrepute. Confusion and strife have filled the industrial world, issuing in a condition that is little short of civil war. The situation sadly discounts our Christianity and seriously discredits our American democracy; the peace of society is broken and the efficiency of the nation is impaired. Industrial questions have long been exceedingly troublesome ; the labor problem is now confessedly the greatest unsolved problem of the world war. Said Sir Stephenson Kent, Director General of Labor Supply of Great Britain, " If Great Britain had only one-eighth ofthe number of labor troubles in the past two years that the United States has had, my country would have had to conclude a disgraceful peace with Germany by this time." Only the fact that we have grown used to these troubles, and our attention has been directed elsewhere, has hidden this scandal and menace from our eyes. Talk of a return to the industrial conditions that were is ignorant and vain. Reconstruction of the industrial order is a moral and a social necessity. But what do we wish to reconstruct? What are the fundamental principles that we should recognize and upon which we should build ? What are the great ends that we are to seek in and through the industrial order? What changes are necessary in the primary principles and ideas of men ? And in what new policies of ac...