American business men before the war appreciated the educational system which made people over into workers without will or purpose of their own.  But the situation was embarrassing as these business men were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the people, should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of the state, while industry was pursued solely for private interest.  Their embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions of industrial reconstruction which will follow the war.  Then as patriots, under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially, they will feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial education, possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted as a national policy.  In other words as Germany has evolved its methods of attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have played the leading part in the attainment, the German system of industrial education, private business may argue, should be given for patriotic reasons full opportunity in the United States.  If the German system were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could deliver wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed in their industrial activity than they are now.  It was in Germany a comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen explains, the psychology of the German people was still feudal when the modern system of industry, with its own characteristic enslavement, was imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people unlike the Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of the political philosophy which developed along with modern technology in both England and America.[A]

[Footnote A:  Thorstein Veblen.—­Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution.]

First, then, it is not certain that the system of German industrial education would succeed; and, second, if it did succeed it is not the sort of education that America wants.

America wants industrial efficiency, it must have efficient workers if it holds its place among nations, and American people will prove their efficiency or their inefficiency as they are capable of using the heritage which industrial evolution has given the world.  But what shall we use this efficiency for?  For the sake of the heritage?  For the sake of business?  For the sake of Empire?

Business knows very clearly why it wants it, but as a rule most of us are not clearly conscious that we need, for the sake of our expansive existence, to be industrially efficient.  We are not even conscious that industry is the great field for adventure and growth, because we use that field not for the creative but for the exploitive purpose.