that the prevailing American
conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion.
Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited
popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities. Yet it would
be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically
unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which
makes for individual bondage. Neither does the bondage which such a
system fastens upon the individual exist only in the case of those
individuals who are victimized by the pressure of unlimited economic
competition. Such victims exist, of course, in large numbers, and they
will come to exist in still larger number hereafter; but hitherto, at
least, the characteristic vice of the American system has not been the
bondage imposed upon its victims. Much more insidious has been the
bondage imposed upon the conquerors and their camp-followers. A man's
individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions
imposed by such a system as it is by failure. His actual occupation may
tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the
work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself
thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal
independence or any peculiar personal distinction. Different as American
business men are one from another in temperament, circumstances, and
habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike. Their
individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate
measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its
results in cash.

Consider for a moment what individuality and individual independence
really mean. A genuine individual must at least possess some special
quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the
successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which
results in personal moral freedom. In what way and to what extent does
the existing economic system contribute to the creation of such genuine
individuals? At its best it asks of every man who engages in a business
occupation that he make as much money as he can, and the only conditions
it imposes on this pursuit of money are those contained in the law of
the land and a certain conventional moral code. The pursuit of money is
to arouse a man to individual activity, and law and custom determine the
conditions to which the activity must