industrial methods could be effected without a prolonged period of agitation, which would undoubtedly injure the prosperity and unsettle the standing of the victims of the agitation; and no matter what the results of the agitation, there must be individual loss and suffering.  But there is a distinction to be made between industrial efficiency and business prosperity.  Americans have hitherto identified prosperity with a furious economic activity, and an ever-increasing economic product—­regardless of genuine economy of production and any proper distribution of the fruits.  Unquestionably, the proposed reorganization of American industrial methods would for a while make many individual Americans less prosperous.  But it does not follow that the efficiency of the national economic organization need be compromised, because its fruits are differently distributed and are temporarily less abundant.  It is impossible to judge at present how far that efficiency depends upon the chance, which Americans have enjoyed, of appropriating far more money than they have earned, and far more than they can spend except either by squandering it or giving it away.  But in any event the dangerous lack of national economic balance involved by the existing distribution of wealth must be redressed.  This object is so essential that its attainment is worth the inevitable attendant risks.  In seeking to bring it about, no clear-sighted democratic economist would expect to “have it both ways.”  Even a very gradual displacement of the existing method of distributing economic fruits will bring with it regrettable wounds and losses.  But provided they are incurred for the benefit of the American people as an economic whole, they are worth the penalty.  The national economic interest demands, on the one hand, the combination of abundant individual opportunity with efficient organization, and on the other, a wholesome distribution, of the fruits; and these joint essentials will be more certainly attained under some such system as the one suggested than they are under the present system.

The genuine economic interest of the individual, like the genuine political interest, demands a distribution of economic power and responsibility, which will enable men of exceptional ability an exceptional opportunity of exercising it.  Industrial leaders, like political leaders, should be content with the opportunity of doing efficient work, and with a scale of reward which permits them to live a complete human life.  At present the opportunity of doing efficient industrial work is in the case of the millionaires (not in that of their equally or more efficient employees) accompanied by an excessive measure of reward, which is, in the moral interest of the individual, either meaningless or corrupting.  The point at which these rewards cease to be earned is a difficult one to define; but there certainly can be no injustice in appropriating for the community those increases in value which are