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Many would agree with Russell in saying that all the great cities are centers of deterioration in the life of their nations. Education, then, must undertake to control industrialism. This does not mean, necessarily, that it must try to check it, but that the motives in individual and social life that produce industrialism must in some way be under the control of educational forces.
It extended far beyond the limits of pure industrialism; it moulded and controlled society in all its forms, destroying ideals old as history, reversing values, confusing issues and wrecking man's powers of judgment.
If we are to galvanize that old collection of laws into some semblance of life, every one f them must be re-written and brought up to date. They are inappropriate for modern life; their interest is purely historical. We want new values. We are no longer nomads. Industrialism has killed the pastoral and the agricultural points of view.
This is not a plea for a back-to-nature movement, for the simple life, for a life which tends away from industrialism. Industrialism will go on, if for no other reason, because pastoral or agricultural peoples would soon be at a disadvantage in an industrial world as it is organized now, for want of rapid increase in population.
Rights that are not contingent on the due discharge of duties and obligations are but hateful privilege; privilege has issue in selfishness and egotism, which in turn work themselves out in warfare and in the hatred that both precedes and follows conflict. The net result of a century and a half of industrialism is avarice, warfare and hate.
But the dawn of a new day is breaking and industrialism seems to be the spirit of the age. The very fact that the Negro was not allowed to attend the white man's school in the South gave the Negro a Tuskegee. For similar reasons the Negro has been forced to build his own libraries, his own theatres, his own hotels, and to establish many other business enterprises.
Wrenn, much pleased with himself, smiled au prince upon his new friends. Mrs. Stettinius was getting into her stride for a few remarks upon the poetry of industrialism when Mr. Gutch, who had been "Uh "ing for some moments, trying to get in his remark, winked with sly rudeness at Miss Saxonby and observed: "I fancy romance isn't quite dead yet, y' know.
The abomination of industrialism; the loss of land and capital by the people in great districts of Europe; the failure of modern discovery to serve the end of man; the series of larger and still larger wars following in a rapidly rising scale of severity and destruction till the dead are now counted in tens of millions; the increasing chaos and misfortune of society all these attach one to the other, each falls into its place, and a hundred smaller phenomena as well, when we appreciate, as today we can, the nature and the magnitude of that fundamental catastrophe.
And to add to the complexity, there was growing in intensity during all these years the problem of Industrialism the transformation of the very bases of life in all civilised communities, and the consequent development of wholly new, and terribly difficult, social issues.
"It is a conventional economic truism that American industrialism is guaranteeing to some half of the forty millions of our industrial population a life of such limited happiness, of such restrictions on personal development, and of such misery and desolation when sickness or accident comes, that we should be childish political scientists not to see that from such an environment little self-sacrificing love of country, little of ethics, little of gratitude could come.
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