Out of this close association of men in industry have grown our national and international business corporations and our national and international labor unions.  These corporations and unions are transforming local and provincial relations into cosmopolitan acquaintanceship.  The recognized value of the acquaintance is in the extension of knowledge of people through their use and wont of material things, of the ways and means of life outside limited and personal areas.  The acquaintanceship does not imply friendship or sympathy or understanding among men or nations, it does not necessarily result in wisdom, and to date, it does not result in a larger social spirit.  The acquaintanceship is based not on mutuality of interest, but rather on rivalry and misinterpretations.

While our institutional life is an acknowledgment that interdependence is a necessary factor in modern wealth production, we still measure the strength of a man, or a society, or a nation, and say of all that they are strong or weak as they are able apparently to stand alone.  We have not yet discovered that a desire to stand alone in an enterprise where people are of necessity dependent, is a weakness and that our ability to cooeperate with others in such an enterprise is a measure of our strength, “From a social standpoint dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence.  There is always danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual.  In making him more self-reliant, it makes him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference.  It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relation to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone, an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world."[A]

[Footnote A:  John Dewey—­Democracy and Education, p. 52.]

This provincial desire of individuals to stand apart and prove to themselves and to others that they are exceptional people is a primitive ambition in conflict with the actual facts of a present day society where interdependence is a law of living.  This conflict is kept alive by the industrial motive of exploitation of people and of wealth.  Exploitation precludes sympathy as it precludes growth.  “For sympathy—­as a desirable quality is something more than mere feeling; it is cultivated imagination for what men have in common and rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.”  And further, Professor Dewey remarks:  “It must be borne in mind that ultimately social efficiency means neither more nor less than capacity to share in a give-and-take experience.  It covers all that makes one’s own experience more worth while to others and all that makes one participate more richly in the worth while experiences of others."[A]

[Footnote A:  John Dewey—­Democracy and Education, p. 141.]