With production for profit and segregation of industries has come an almost infinitesimal division and specialization of labour.  Under a right industrial system this would be reduced, not magnified.  The dignity of labour and the joy of creation demand that in so far as possible each man should carry through one entire operation.  This is of course now, and always has been under any highly developed civilization, impossible in practice, except along certain lines of art and craftsmanship.  The evils of the existing system can in a measure be done away with the moment production for use is the recognized law, for it is only in bulk-production that this intensive specialization can be made to pay.  Bulk-production there will always be until, and if, the world is reorganized on the basis of an infinite number of self-contained social units, but in the ideal community—­and I am dealing now with ideals—­it would not exist.

Allied with this is the whole question of the factory method and the use and misuse of machinery.  It seems to me that the true principle is that machinery and the factory are admissible only when so employed they actually do produce, in bulk operations, a better product, and with less labour, than is possible through hand work.  Weaving, forging and all work where human action must be more or less mechanical, offer a fair field for the machine and the factory, but wherever the human element can enter, where personality and the skilled craft of the hand are given play, the machine and the factory are inadmissible.  The great city, creation of “big business,” segregation of industries, advertising, salesmanship and a hundred other concomitants of modernism, have built up an abnormal and avaricious demand for bulk-production along lines where the handicraft should function.  It becomes necessary—­let us say—­to provide a million dollars worth of furniture for a ten million dollar hotel (itself to be superseded and scrapped in perhaps ten years) and naturally only the most intensive and efficient factory system can meet this demand.  Rightly, however, the furniture of a community should be produced by the local cabinet makers, and so it should be in many other industries now entirely taken over by the factory system.

For the future then we must consciously work for the building upward from primary units, so completely reversing our present practice of creating the big thing and fighting hopelessly to preserve such small and few doles of liberty and personality as may be permitted to filter downward from above.  This is the only true democracy, and the thing we call by the name is not this, largely because we have bent our best energies to the building up of vast and imperial aggregates which have inevitably assumed a complete unity in themselves and become dominating, tyrannical and ruthless forces that have operated regardless of the sound laws and wholesome principles of a right society.  Neither the vital democracy of principle nor the artificial democracy of practice can exist in conjunction with imperialism, whether this is established in government, in industry, in trade, in society or in education.