30 Wisconsiji Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



By engaging in such enterprises, in the present condition of 

 things, tiae government would simply break its own back, and 

 take the burden off the back of nobody. 



Tliat is not the road to easy times. We shall strike that road 

 whf n every man, ricb or poor, will look about him, and try to 

 put in practice in his own neighborhood some very old and hum- 

 ble wisdom, " To do good and communicate forget not." Then, 

 like Banyan's pilgrims in the bogs of the enchanted ground, we 

 may " make a shift to wag along." 



To this line of argument the reply may be made: The divi- 

 sion of labor and the combinations of capital resulting in our 

 large system of industry, have made the system of small savings 

 and their management by individuals, as well as the system of 

 small industries, no longer practicable. 



It is said that as the factory has superseded the distaff and 

 loom of our grandmothers — the railroad, the postman, the ox 

 cart and the horse waggon — the reaper, the cradle and the 

 sickle — so the bank and the insurance company have put an end 

 to the feasibility of individual manipulation of money. This 

 will lead us to take a look over the manner of our industrial con- 

 dition. It is true we have very largely superseded the individual 

 by the corporation — the man by machinery. 



But the question will recur, after all, how much we have made 

 by the process. 



Somehow in spite of our division of labor and combination of 

 capital we are all at the stand still. There is a hitch in affairs 

 evident enough notwithstanding all our power to mass men and 

 money. 



There is a limit to the profitableness of combination, and the 

 question I raise is, whether we have not in a great many things, 

 reached and gone far beyond that limit. The question I raise is, 

 whether our way out of our present complications is not, not by 

 crowding ahead along the lines of combination on which we have 

 been operating, but by taking the back track and paying more 

 attention to the individual and less to the corporation — encour- 

 aging enterprises of individual and local character rather than 

 those which attempt to do the world's business in the gross. 



