INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION 803 



organic relations. If large success is to be achieved there must be 

 power to command and a readiness to obey while a state of liberty is 

 at the same time maintained. 



What has been said finds an increased emphasis when we compare 

 the present machine stage of production, characterized by a high 

 degree of competition, with the earlier handicraft stage. Especially 

 are alertness, adaptability, and quickness of adjustment conditions 

 of large success at the present time. The ties of an economic char- 

 acter binding us to our fellows have increased extensively and in- 

 tensively with unprecedented rapidity. The term " industrial 

 society " has only recently become familiar, arid this is a result of 

 these ties. As a further result we have a growing social self -conscious- 

 ness which imposes its own problems upon members of an economic 

 society, but which at the same time is one of the essential conditions 

 of our advanced life. 



It follows naturally enough that those who succeed in a lower stage 

 are crowded down and out in a higher stage. It is proved conclu- 

 sively by history and by present observation of easily accessible 

 facts. The piratical merchant who is a hero in an earlier stage hangs 

 from the yardarm in our stage. The ancient Germans, Tacitus tells 

 us, thought it a disgrace to gain by the sweat of the brow what could 

 be secured by the sword. There is no room for doubt that many 

 a modern bandit would, in an earlier and cruder stage of society, 

 have been a hero. This is, perhaps, a sufficiently familiar observation, 

 but the implications of it are often overlooked even by scholars when 

 they come to treat present economic problems. Men are in varying 

 degrees mentally prepared for the present economic conditions which 

 have been gradually reached during thousands of years. Within the 

 nation there are those who, in mental traits and characteristics, are 

 only imperfectly prepared for modern economic life and must be 

 treated correspondingly. Man's mental and moral makeup is 

 capable only of a limited modification after the period of maturity, 

 and even in the case of children heredity sets a limit to the possi- 

 bilities of modification, although this limit is a far more flexible one. 

 To take a very marked illustration, we have, in the United States, on 

 the one hand, the Negroes, and on the other hand, the Redmen, who, 

 themselves or their near ancestors, were brought up in a stage. of 

 industrial society separated from ours by a period of hundreds if not 

 thousands of years. Is it conceivable that in a short period they can 

 acquire those characteristics, such as forethought, careful planning, 

 and a\vaiting results, which lead to success in the most advanced eco- 

 nomic society? What is true of these races is true only in a less 

 marked manner of other classes of society. We may lay it down as 

 a general proposition that during the past century the generalization 

 of economic progress has been more rapid than the generalization of 



