INDUSTRIALISM 355 



INDUSTEIALISM 



By Professor CHARLES S. SLICHTER 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 



IT is unusual nowadays to write hopefully of our own times; it is so 

 easy to point out the shortcomings of the industrial age, and so diffi- 

 cult clearly to see beyond the rapid changes of our times and properly to 

 measure the huge forces now at work in society. To many critics, this 

 is but the age of material things; poetry, faith, the hope eternal, have 

 quite forsaken the human heart. Such critics look upon the industrial 

 leader and the engineer as just so much wasted material that might 

 have gone (in a better age, of course) to make a poet or an artist. 

 I shall not attempt to explain industrialism, or to seek an inner meaning 

 without admitting the transient evils — to do so would be to claim that 

 great epochs of readjustment are not periods of discomfort and even 

 disaster to many of the species. 



Culture, in its many forms, developed and embraced no new types 

 from the dawn of civilization until modern times, except those which 

 burst forth in the past century. The forces that have brought the race 

 to its present place — at least most of them — are readily agreed upon. 

 First is war, then religion, then poetry and literature, then art, philos- 

 ophy, commerce, music, capital, politics, society, science, industrialism. 

 The first in this list I name in order of their force or potency. The 

 final two — science, industrialism — I name last with prophetic intent. 

 They are the new giants in modern civilization, and novel in this, that 

 they are the first great forms of culture that are antagonistic to some of 

 the ancient types which have so long dominated human destiny. 



Must I justify placing war first among the forces that have given us 

 the civilization of to-day? It is enough to illustrate it by our own 

 century and a third of national experience. War it was that gave us 

 independence. It was the Mexican War that confirmed us a Pacific, 

 as well as an Atlantic, power — with all the consequences that must 

 flow therefrom in the distant future. Again, it was civil war that knit 

 us together as a nation, and made us strong to work out our destiny as 

 a single people. And again it was war that entered us upon our career 

 as a world power, a new nationalism at home, a new imperialism abroad. 

 And lastly, it was war — trivial it is true, only a Panama revolution let 

 loose from Washington, but, nevertheless, war — that gave us Panama 

 and has led to one of the most far-reaching results of all time — namely, 

 the proof that the white man can conquer the tropics. Thus is war the 



