ture.

During recent times--particularly in the last fifty years--the changes
in economic and social life have been so rapid that the "always was and
always will be" protest is having a harder and harder time to make
itself heard above the clatter of the social house-wreckers, and the rap
and beat of the social construction engineers.

2. _The Capitalist Experiment_

The present economic society is an experiment--less than a century old
in most parts of the world. It has evolved rapidly through a series of
forms, corresponding with the rapid advances in the methods by which men
wrested a living from nature.

The masses of the people in industrial countries have abandoned their
farms, their villages and their rural life, have moved into the cities,
and have gone to work in the mines, factories, mills, stores and
offices, very much as the mechanics and farmers dropped their accustomed
tools and rushed to the gold fields of California and Australia. Within
two or three generations the whole basis of life has been shifted and a
new order has been established. This change has been made for the
purpose of securing a better living.

The people in the industrial countries have accepted capitalism as an
essentially desirable means of gaining a livelihood. The new order has
given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the
past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense
number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but
things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of
those who had never enjoyed many possessions.

The new order has made each family in an industrial district doubly
dependent--dependent on a job which it can in no wise control, and
dependent on the economic mechanism for the supply of goods and services
without which mass city life is quite impossible. The rural family had a
supplementary source of living in its chickens, pigs, cows, goats, bees
and garden. Fuel was cheap and nature provided berries, nuts and game.
Life was rough, but the means of maintaining it were relatively
abundant. City life has cut away almost all of these forms of
supplementary income, at the same time that it has imposed upon the
family the need to pay for practically all goods and services. The city
breadwinner must get and hold a job, if his family is to live.

Mass life in cities, mass work in factories, job-dependence--all of
these experiment