8 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



machinery for regulating values. They involve man's abilities, his 

 affections, and his tools, all of which have been brusquely treated in 

 the past, and might be scientifically treated in the future. An indus- 

 trial civilisation is unthinkable without division and, therefore, 

 specialisation, of labour, and without tools and capital instruments. 

 Then life itself is not much worth living without social ties and the 

 allegiances of place and kin. These three indispensable elements of 

 the good life bring out defensive mechanisms for their protection. No 

 one likes to see a man highly trained for a special service or specially 

 fitted by natural aptitudes cut off from opportunity to use his powers 

 and reduced to the level of an unskilled biped. No one likes to see 

 the results of abstinence and specially directed labour which is 

 embodied in a great machine or factory rendered impotent long 

 before it has given its life's usefulness. Waste of skill and of capital 

 are alike grave faults by which we should judge and condemn an 

 industrial organisation. And since man does not live by bread 

 alone, if a ruthless industrial organisation continually tears up the 

 family from its roots, transferring it without choice, to new surround- 

 ings, destroying the ties of kin, home and social life, of educational 

 and recreational environments, it is far from ideal. Human labour 

 can never be indefinitely fluid and transferable in a society that has 

 a soul above consumption of mere commodities. These three 

 obstructions to change are not final and rigid limitations upon it. 

 Men die, their skill and home associations with them. Plant and 

 equipment wear out. Their successor presents a natural opportunity 

 in each of the three cases for the introduction of change in position, 

 in aptitude, in purpose or design, without waste or human distress. 

 The length of working life and the durability of materials mark the 

 natural phase or periodicity of a smoothly changing society — its 

 quanta, so to speak. But the impetus for change or the irritant has 

 no such intervals. It proceeds from various causes : varying 

 harvests, changes in natural forces ; changing human desires and 

 fashions ; differences in the rate of growth of population in its 

 different parts ; the collective psychological errors of optimism and 

 pessimism in business in an individualistic society ; variations in 

 gold supplies and credit policies based thereon. All or any of these, 

 without invoking any disturbances from the impact of scientific 

 discovery, would serve to make adjustments necessary outside the 

 natural phases to which I have referred, in a society with parts that 

 are interdependent through division of labour, and localisation of 

 industry, joined by foreign trade and convenient transport. These 

 alone would bring about a changing world with incomplete adapta- 

 tions, loss of capital, and so-called frictional unemployment. It is 

 easy to exaggerate the adjustment necessary for the addition of inven- 

 tion and science to these causes of change. But with the intensifica- 



