s, wholesalers,
jobbers, retailers.

5. Personal service units, which render a service to the consumer in
some direct, personal way--housekeepers, educators, entertainers,
health experts.

6. The financial units, which are concerned with the handling of
money and of credit (the counters of the economic system) banks, loan
associations, credit houses.

These are some of the main divisions of the economic system as it exists
at the present time. Each division is a great net-work of economic
inter-relations, specialized and subdivided into individual plants,
factories, departments and the like. Take, as an example, one group, the
manufacturing industries of the United States. When the Census of 1914
was compiled, the manufacturing industries were classed in fourteen
groups,--food and food products, textiles, iron and steel and their
products, lumber and its remanufactures, etc. There were 496,234
wage-earners working in 59,317 food and food products establishments,
1,498,644 wage-earners in 22,995 textile establishments, 1,061,058
individuals working in 17,719 iron and steel establishments, and so
forth. Each of the fourteen subdivisions of the manufacturing industries
of the United States employ hundreds of thousands of men and women who
are at work in tens of thousands of establishments in thousands of
cities and town. The same kind of specialization is to be found
throughout the various modern industries, and in the different
industrial countries.

Each one of the larger establishments--each factory or plant--is in turn
composed of departments, divisions, shops and the like.

Whether the individual establishment or the individual department be
regarded as the unit of economic activity, the outstanding feature of
the manufacturing industry is the immense number of units that must be
in working order and co-operating harmoniously with the others before
the whole can function smoothly. And this is but one of the general
divisions of industry. At the time of the Census of 1920 there were in
the United States alone, 6,447,998 farms; in 1914 there were 275,791
manufacturing establishments; in 1910 there were 1,127,926 retail
dealers and 50,123 wholesale dealers. Literally, there are millions of
productive economic units in this one country which are specialized,
which are associated in their activities and which must be put on a
co-operative basis if effective results are to be obtained from them.