Our modern social organization, wrought out in elaborate detail under the discipline of the industrial revolution of the last century, is now everywhere being subjected to the test of self-justification. Some of the charges against it are proved and many modifications and adjustments are being made in its methods and processes. While in America the main fundamentals of the industrial order still prevail, such for example as the wide difference between the profit-getting class and the wage-earning class, there is a growing tendency, more obvious in continental Europe, for society to break up into its component, local, or class divisions.
The intricate and vast forces of an order functioning on a basis of material wealth are like a modern Frankenstein monster—they are overpowering their own creator, the human mind. The human social tissue cannot stand the strain of the diversified loyalties and impersonal forces under whose domination it is called upon to function; for with stock companies, holding companies, absentee control, intricate legal relationships understood only by the specialist, the man in the street has little real knowledge of whom he serves or what are the forces that control and direct his employment and activity. Instead of this complicated and impersonal machinery, men are now seeking the simpler and more direct methods of contact which they can understand and which will prove more elastic and' conformable to the immediate needs of the community life. The banding together of trades into unions, wide geographically but narrow mentally, is but a manifestation of the effort to delineate the modern community and to protect its interests.
Again, as a force probing into the modern industrial order, we have the awakening of men's consciences throughout all levels of society. The restlessness that pervades the world is to no small measure the result of the striving, in our blind human way, for better things—for a larger measure of happiness and liberty. The war has aroused us to an awareness of the industrial and moral injustice which our apathy and ignorance had permitted to grow up under the conditions of a crude, mechanical, dehumanized economic system; many of us have been temporarily freed by war activities from the routine and seeming necessity of the burdensome industrial regime, and we look back with loathing upon the mental bondage of our former "jobs" and with a determination to get something better and freer for ourselves and our children.
