r the war's
probable results in their broader sociological aspects.

"If what I have predicted happens," he replied, "the democratic elements
of society in all nations will become apprehensive of the loss of
liberty.

"They will fear that in the interests of efficiency the perfected social
order will impose minute and unwelcome regulations upon individual life
and effort, and that a degree of coercive control will be established
which will end by making individuals mere cogs in the machine,
diminishing their importance, curtailing their usefulness and initiative
far more than is done by the great industrial corporations against which
the working classes already are protesting so loudly.

"And not only the working people but a large proportion of all other
classes will develop these fears, especially in those nations which,
during the last century, have built up popular sovereignty and
democratic freedom, as the terms are understood in England and America.

"We shall hear the argument that the loss of individual initiative and
personal self-reliance is too great a price to pay even for supreme
efficiency and the maximum production of material comforts.

"The problem which such a conflict of interests and opinions will
present may be speculatively defined as that of trying to find a way to
reconcile a maximum of efficiency organization with a maximum of
individual freedom.

"So stating it, we have to recognize that this has been the biggest
problem, in fact the comprehensive problem, that man, has faced
throughout human history, and the one which, really, he has been trying
to solve by the trial and error method in all his social experiments.

"It is the sociological as distinguished from the merely economic
problem.

"Human society exists because early in his career man discovered that
mutual aid, or team work, is, on the whole, in the struggle for
existence and the pursuit of happiness, a more effective factor than
physical strength or individual cleverness.

"Natural selection has acted not only upon individuals, but, in the
large sense, upon groups and aggregates of groups. The restrictions upon
individual life have developed in the interests of groups, or collective
efficiency.

"On the other hand, collective efficiency has no meaning, it serves no
purpose apart from the amelioration of individual life and the
development of individual personality.

"So long as groups fear one another and fight with one