ost
people a period, as I have said, of squalor, disease, and degradation.
The fundamental trouble could be summed up in the one word, _poverty_.
The mission of the new industrial system, for the most part unconscious
and unrecognized, was to transform the world by abolishing the reign of
poverty. Doubtless it would be desirable if the improvement of
conditions, material and spiritual, could make progress with exactly
even pace on some perfectly symmetrical plan. But history shows us that
the forward social movement has proceeded first in one aspect, then in
another, on lines so tangential, often so zigzag, that it is difficult
until one gets distance enough for perspective, to see that any true
progress has been made at all.

Thus, the modern industrial system, which found the conditions of
poverty, disease, and hardship prevalent, seemed for quite a long time,
in its rude breaking up of old relations and its ruthless adherence to
certain newly proclaimed principles, to have brought matters from bad
to worse. The squalor and poverty of the village of hand-loom weavers
seemed only intensified in the new industrial towns to which the
weavers flocked from their deserted hamlets. Manufacturers were doing
business under the fiercest and most unregulated competition.
Economists were demonstrating their "law of supply and demand" and
their "iron law of wages" as capable in themselves of regulating all
the conditions and relations of business life. Epidemics raged and
depravity prevailed in the new factory centers.

But things were not, in reality, going from bad to worse. The
beginnings of a better order had to be based upon two things: first and
foremost, the sheer creation of capital; second, the discipline and
training of workers. In the first phases, the new modern business
period had to be a period of production. There had got to be developed
the instrumentalities for the creation of wealth. Until the industrial
system had raised up its class of efficient workers and had created its
great mass of capital for productive purposes, there could be no supply
of cheap goods; and without an abundant and cheap output there could be
no possible diffusion of economic benefits; in other words, no marked
amelioration of the prevailing poverty.

It required some development of wealth to lift our modern peoples out
of a poverty too grinding and too debasing for intellectual or moral
progress. It is true that the factory towns, crea