read this inscription: "Raised to Giordano Bruno by the generation which he foresaw."

Our business is not to look behind, but to look ahead along the road over which mankind is moving. The future has more significance than the past, in that it calls to action while the past is silent. The past cannot be altered, the future is plastic. For the past we have no moral concern, for the future we are responsible. "We are still the heirs of all the ages that have gone, but we are no less truly the ancestors of all the ages that are to come.

Chapter III

THE MACHINE AND
STANDARDIZATION

"I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it."

-VOLTAIRE to HELVETIUS.

THE year 1776 was one of history's great turning points. It was marked by three events of almost immeasurable consequence: the Declaration of Independence which opened a new chapter in the philosophy and practice of government; the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations which laid the foundations of a new economics; but chiefly, the invention by a man named Wilkinson of a cylinder that made Watt's new steam engine really work. It was this cylinder that changed the course of history and the destiny of man. The Age of Machinery stood beckoning on the threshold, and the human race walked into a

revolution the termination of which we cannot foresee and the consequences of which we do not know how to measure.

For beginning with Watt's steam engine we have pressed excitedly from one invention to another, harnessing new forces to ever new mechanical appliances. In the first eagerness of our pursuit we did not know that we were following a one-way path along which there could be no retreat. Only within more recent years, as the machine process has fastened itself on every detail of our lives, have we sensed the difficulties into which we have so unwittingly wandered. We know now that we are not completely the masters of the machines we have created. Their pulsations we can control, but their consequences control us. They have risen like living things to dominate our entire civilization. They have called into being hundreds of millions of people who otherwise would not have been born. For these hundreds of millions they are the sole means of existence. Stop the machines and half the people in the world would perish in a month.

Modern industry has become a mechanical circle: we create machinery in order to increase production, only to find that increased produc

tion involves the necessity of creating more machinery. We produce in order that we may consume and discover that we must consume in order that we may produce. In other words, the machine process has become both the means and the object of life. We are trapped by our own inventions. Our machinery seems almost to be endowed with a soul-a vindictive life within itself: we must tend it or it will turn and rend us. The penalty of neglect is death.

It is this inescapable necessity of keeping the machines going that constitutes the great problem of modern economic life. Idle machines mean starvation to the millions of people whom they have brought into the world; active machines mean a surplus of goods beyond the immediate capacity of the race to consume. To this dilemma but one answer has been found: we have kept the machines going, and we have done it by whipping up the demand for their products, by stimulating new desires, by creating new wants. Our problem has become not how to make things but how to dispose of them; not how to produce goods but how to produce customers; not how to develop output but how to intensify consumption. Consumption must constantly keep ahead of production; the

appetite for more things of every kind must be constantly stimulated. One desire must be used to breed another, and these new wants in turn must be fed and nourished so that other new wants may be born. As the editor of a New York newspaper recently remarked, the citizen's first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer. Thrift, which our fathers prized as one of the marks of wisdom, has become a virtue of doubtful social and economic value. If we would survive we must buy. "No matter how much the consumer who can afford to buy may resist," says Ralph Borsodi, "he must be made to eat more, to wear out more clothes, to take more drugs, to blow out more tires. He must consume, consume, consume, so that our industries may produce, produce, produce." Says Garet Garrett: "To consume more and more progressively to be able to say in the evening: 'I have consumed more to-day than I consumed yesterday' this now is a duty the individual owes to industrial society.'

992

Out of this solution of the dilemma with which the machine has confronted us have come all the phenomena of modern business: the pursuit of the buyer; the new science of advertising; the revolu