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 officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporals
equal in authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturing
industries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousand
independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each
with a separate plan of campaign.

Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some
idle because they could find no work at a