of the consumers, because the
ability on which the old industrial order prided itself most and which
is flaunted most as an argument against change, the ability to serve
them effectively, is itself visibly breaking down. It is breaking down
at what was always its most vulnerable point, the control of the human
beings whom, with characteristic indifference to all but their economic
significance, it distilled for its own purposes into an abstraction
called "Labor." The first symptom of its collapse is what the first
symptom of economic collapses has usually been in the past--the failure
of customary stimuli to evoke their customary response in human effort.

Till that failure is recognized and industry reorganized so that new
stimuli may have free play, the collapse will not correct itself, but,
doubtless with spasmodic revivals and flickerings of energy, will
continue and accelerate. The cause of it is simple. It is that those
whose business it is to direct economic activity are increasingly
incapable of directing the men upon whom economic activity depends.
The fault is not that of individuals, but of a system, of Industrialism
itself. {140} During the greater part of the nineteenth century
industry was driven by two forces, hunger and fear, and the employer
commanded them both. He could grant or withhold employment as he
pleased. If men revolted against his terms he could dismiss them, and
if they were dismissed what confronted them was starvation or the
workhouse. Authority was centralized; its instruments were passive;
the one thing which they dreaded was unemployment. And since they
could neither prevent its occurrence nor do more than a little to
mitigate its horrors when it occurred, they submitted to a discipline
which they could not resist, and industry pursued its course through
their passive acquiescence in a power which could crush them
individually if they attempted to oppose it.

That system might be lauded as efficient or denounced as inhuman. But,
at least, as its admirers were never tired of pointing out, it worked.
And, like the Prussian State, which alike in its virtues and
deficiencies it not a little resembled, as long as it worked it
survived denunciations of its methods, as a strong man will throw off a
disease. But to-day it is ceasing to have even the qualities of its
defects. It is ceasing to be efficient. It no longer secures the
ever-increasing output of wealth which it offered i