n sufficient for promotion, and also for special feats and single
performances in the various industries. There are many minor
distinctions of standing, not only within the grades but within the
classes, each of which acts as a spur to the efforts of a group. It is
intended that no form of merit shall wholly fail of recognition.

"As for actual neglect of work, positively bad work, or other overt
remissness on the part of men incapable of generous motives, the
discipline of the industrial army is far too strict to allow anything
whatever of the sort. A man able to do duty, and persistently
refusing, is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water
till he consents.

"The lowest grade of the officers of the industrial army, that of
assistant foremen or lieutenants, is appointed out of men who have
held their place for two years in the first class of the first grade.
Where this leaves too large a range of choice, only the first group of
this class are eligible. No one thus comes to the point of commanding
men until he is about thirty years old. After a man becomes an
officer, his rating of course no longer depends on the efficiency of
his own work, but on that of his men. The foremen are appointed from
among the assistant foremen, by the same exercise of discretion
limited to a small eligible class. In the appointments to the still
higher grades another principle is introduced, which it would take
too much time to explain now.

"Of course such a system of grading as I have described would have
been impracticable applied to the small industrial concerns of your
day, in some of which there were hardly enough employees to have left
one apiece for the classes. You must remember that, under the national
organization of labor, all industries are carried on by great bodies
of men, many of your farms or shops being combined as one. It is also
owing solely to the vast scale on which each industry is organized,
with coordinate establishments in every part of the country, that we
are able by exchanges and transfers to fit every man so nearly with
the sort of work he can do best.

"And now, Mr. West, I will leave it to you, on the bare outline of its
features which I have given, if those who need special incentives to
do their best are likely to lack them under our system. Does it not
seem to you that men who found themselves obliged, whether they wished
or not, to work, would under such a system be strongly impelled to d