CHAPTER XXVII

INDUSTRIAL RECONSTRUCTION

Our modern industrial evils are so grave and so deep-rooted that it is highly questionable whether the pressure of public opinion, piecemeal legislation, and the development of codes of honor can strike deep enough to eradicate them.  Is not, perhaps, the whole system morally wrong?  Instead of these endless attempts to cure the natural results of the system, is there not need of a radical reconstruction?  Various attempts have been made, divers proposals are offered, in the hope of curing the causes of present maladies and devising a juster system.  Many of these are doubtless impracticable, or tend to work more hardship than amelioration.  But each proposal, of any plausibility, has a right to a hearing if it offers to end the great wrongs of contemporary industry; we must be very confident that it will not work before we reject it.  For some way must be found to right these wrongs, or our whole industrial order will go to smash.  We must not condemn too hastily a method which has not had a thorough trial, or whose defects time and experience might remedy.  For mistaken experiments can be discontinued; and great as is the danger in incautious radicalism, the danger in “standing pat” is greater.

Ought the trusts to be broken up or regulated?

The greatest sinners are, certainly, to speak generally, the great corporations that we call trusts-though the word “distrust” would better express contemporary feeling!  So great has popular hostility to them become that the Democratic party platform of July, 1912, declared that “a private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable,” and demanded “the enactment of such additional legislation as may be necessary to make it impossible for a private monopoly to exist in the United States,” i.e., “the control by any one corporation of so large a proportion of any industry as to make it a menace to competitive conditions.”  But is it necessary to destroy this splendidly efficient concentration of industry in order to avoid its evils?  The proposal to revert to the older competitive plan is reminiscent of the outcry against machine production a century earlier, and the earnest pleas then made to return to the hand-tool method.  “Big business” constitutes one of the greatest advances in human industry, and therefore has surely come to stay.  From the era of individual workers owning their tools, mankind advanced to the age of competition between small concerns using machines; no less marked an advance is that to the age of large-scale production and unified industry.  Its advantages may be briefly summarized: 

(1) The competitive system involves needless duplications of plant, machinery, and workers; clerks stand idly in rival stores, waiting for trade, drummers spend their time in getting trade away from one another, great sums have to be spent on advertising.  Monopoly means a saving of all this wasted time, labor, and money.