century before, had, with its various collateral developments,
financial, educational, journalistic, etc., become not only the greatest
force in society, but as well a thing operating on the largest scale
that man had ever essayed: beside it the Roman Empire was parochial.
The result of this institution, conceived on such imperial lines, was,
in the field we are now considering, the total destruction of the sense
of the holiness of labour and of joy in work. It extended far beyond the
limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all
its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing
issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment. Until the war it seemed
irresistible, now its weakness and the fallacy of its assumptions are
revealed, but it has become so absolutely a part of our life, indeed of
our nature, that we are unable to estimate it by any sound standards of
judgment, and even when we approximate this we cannot think in other
terms when we try to devise our schemes of redemption. Even the
socialist and the Bolshevik think in imperial terms when they try to
compass the ending of imperialism.
Under this supreme system, as I see it, the two essential things I have
spoken of cannot be restored, nor could they maintain themselves if, by
some miracle, they were once re-established. The indictment cannot be
closed here. The actual condition that has developed from industrialism
presents certain factors that are not consonant with sane, wholesome and
Christian living. Not only has the unit of human scale in human society
been done away with, not only have the sense of the nobility of work and
joy in the doing been exterminated, but, as well, certain absolutely
false principles and methods have been adopted which are not susceptible
of reform but only of abolition.
Of some of these I have spoken already; the alarming drift towards
cities, until now in the United States more than one-half the population
is urban; the segregation of industries in certain cities and regions;
the minute division of labour and intensive specialization; the abnormal
growth of a true proletariat or non-land-holding class; the flooding of
the country by cheap labour drawn from the most backward communities and
from peoples of low race-value. Out of this has arisen a bitter class
conflict and the ominous beginnings of a perilous class consciousness,
with actual warfare joined in several countries, and th
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