It is the economic individualism of our existing national system which inflicts the most serious damage on American individuality; and American individual achievement in politics and science and the arts will remain partially impoverished as long as our fellow-countrymen neglect or refuse systematically to regulate the distribution of wealth in the national interest.  I am aware, of course, that the prevailing American conviction is absolutely contradictory of the foregoing assertion.  Americans have always associated individual freedom with the unlimited popular enjoyment of all available economic opportunities.  Yet it would be far more true to say that the popular enjoyment of practically unrestricted economic opportunities is precisely the condition which makes for individual bondage.  Neither does the bondage which such a system fastens upon the individual exist only in the case of those individuals who are victimized by the pressure of unlimited economic competition.  Such victims exist, of course, in large numbers, and they will come to exist in still larger number hereafter; but hitherto, at least, the characteristic vice of the American system has not been the bondage imposed upon its victims.  Much more insidious has been the bondage imposed upon the conquerors and their camp-followers.  A man’s individuality is as much compromised by success under the conditions imposed by such a system as it is by failure.  His actual occupation may tend to make his individuality real and fruitful; but the quality of the work is determined by a merely acquisitive motive, and the man himself thereby usually debarred from obtaining any edifying personal independence or any peculiar personal distinction.  Different as American business men are one from another in temperament, circumstances, and habits, they have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike.  Their individualities are forced into a common mold, because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash.

Consider for a moment what individuality and individual independence really mean.  A genuine individual must at least possess some special quality which distinguishes him from other people, which unifies the successive phases and the various aspects of his own life and which results in personal moral freedom.  In what way and to what extent does the existing economic system contribute to the creation of such genuine individuals?  At its best it asks of every man who engages in a business occupation that he make as much money as he can, and the only conditions it imposes on this pursuit of money are those contained in the law of the land and a certain conventional moral code.  The pursuit of money is to arouse a man to individual activity, and law and custom determine the conditions to which the activity must conform.  The man does not become an individual merely by obeying the written and unwritten laws.  He becomes an individual because the desire to make money releases