e people so meanly dressed, and so many
of them ragged and hungry!

Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and
found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been in
this quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been on
Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceived
the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride
in the fact that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousand
independent manufacturing establishments; but in this very
multiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of the
insignificant total product of their industry.

If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a
spectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vital
function, than distribution. For not only were these four thousand
establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone
operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve
a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost
skill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and working
by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises.

The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side
was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords
wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, each
under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it,
and its sappers busy below, undermining them.

Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry
was insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single central
authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted.
Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By what hiatus in the
logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, for
the failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle
to the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that
if lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it must
have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of
the nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more
complex in the relationship of their parts.

People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were
neither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army
corps,--no unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporal's
squad, with no o