the public, is as great as his
own. For the economic developments of the last thirty years have made
the managerial and technical _personnel_ of industry the repositories
of public responsibilities of quite incalculable importance, which,
with the best will in the world, they can hardly at present discharge.
The most salient characteristic of modern industrial organization is
that production is carried on under the general direction of business
men, who do not themselves necessarily know anything of productive
processes. "Business" {171} and "industry" tend to an increasing
extent to form two compartments, which, though united within the same
economic system, employ different types of _personnel_, evoke different
qualities and recognize different standards of efficiency and
workmanship. The technical and managerial staff of industry is, of
course, as amenable as other men to economic incentives. But their
special work is production, not finance; and, provided they are not
smarting under a sense of economic injustice, they want, like most
workmen, to "see the job done properly." The business men who
ultimately control industry are concerned with the promotion and
capitalization of companies, with competitive selling and the
advertisement of wares, the control of markets, the securing of special
advantages, and the arrangement of pools, combines and monopolies.
They are preoccupied, in fact, with financial results, and are
interested in the actual making of goods only in so far as financial
results accrue from it.

The change in organization which has, to a considerable degree,
specialized the spheres of business and management is comparable in its
importance to that which separated business and labor a century and a
half ago. It is specially momentous for the consumer. As long as the
functions of manager, technician and capitalist were combined, as in
the classical era of the factory system, in the single person of "the
employer," it was not unreasonable to assume that profits and
productive efficiency ran similarly together. In such circumstances
the ingenuity with which economists proved {172} that, in obedience to
"the law of substitution," he would choose the most economical process,
machine, or type of organization, wore a certain plausibility. True,
the employer might, even so, adulterate his goods or exploit the labor
of a helpless class of workers. But as long as the person directing
industry was him