ating streets teeming with crowded trolley-cars, radiating outward like the fingers of a Brobdingnagian hand through a vast dreary waste of crisscross streets lined with rows of sootblackened wooden houses, on and on, mile after mile, till they reach stupendous palaces of steel and glass that suck in and disgorge hundreds of thousands of workmen morning and night. Automobiles are everywhere-automobiles in solid ranks along the curbs, automobiles parked solidly in public squares and vacant lots, automobiles rushing up and down in unbroken streams. Automobiles! automobiles! Such is Detroit. Yet, despite all this, Detroit is still in many ways a village. It has a village transportation system, village newspapers, a village society, a village point of view. This is a very typically American thing, Roberval, that villages become metropolises and yet remain villages. A village of one million people! For Detroit is making over half the world's automobiles.

What are these people thinking who rush up and down in trolley-car and motor, who crowd these sidewalks and shops, who pour in and out of these steel-and-glass palaces where automobiles are wrought? What has the war done to them? I fought my way into a trolley-car that already contained twice as many people as it was built to carry.

"We thought they 'd sold us out to the bosses," one workman was explaining to another.

"How's that?" asked his companion. I edged nearer, listening. It seems that the men in the department of the automobile plant in which the first speaker was employed recently decided to ask for an increase of wages. The entire department belonged belonged to the union; so the men asked their union officials, "What increase shall we demand?" "Demand an increase to one dollar an hour," was the reply. The men delegated the union officials to put this demand up to the plant management. But before the demand had been passed upon, the men made a startling discovery. The non-unionized employees of another plant, doing exactly the same kind of work, were already getting

a dollar and a half an hour. The unionized men turned on their union representatives and charged them with treachery. But there had been no treachery. The non-unionized men had simply asked for a dollar and a half, and got it without question.

"What's the good of belonging to the union?" the speaker concluded.

I dropped off the car. That phrase, "What's the good of belonging to the union?" stuck in my mind. Let me explain, Roberval, that I 've come back to an America torn by industrial conflicts. Strikes, rumors of strikes, industrial conferences that more often fail than succeed, fill the newspapers. From the newspapers one gets the impression of two giants, the labor union and the capitalist, facing each other with set jaws and bared teeth.

In a telephone-book I found the address of the headquarters of the Auto Workers' Union, whose full title is the United Automobile, Aircraft and Vehicle Workers of America. In a small office I discovered William A. Logan, international president of this organization.

"What are your aims in Detroit?" I inquired. Mr. Logan, in answer, started to lecture me on the iniquities of the new law of the State of Michigan which forbids sabotage, and exclaimed that the courts will probably interpret sabotage to mean striking or anything they please.

"But," I insisted, "what are your specific aims and grievances in Detroit?"

He hesitated.

"Well," he said finally, "I guess we have n't anything to complain of. Everything 's all right."

Think of it! Could any one go into the offices of any labor organization in any other industrial capital of the world at the present moment and get such an answer? Perhaps one could. I do not know. Here in Detroit, at least, labor organizations are apparently unable to raise an issue because they know that any group of men, unionized or not, can go to an employer and get almost anything they want. Why?

I took a car for one of the steel-andglass palaces.

"Labor troubles?" the manager repeated in answer to my question. "In the ordinary sense, no. We have n't time to fight out wage disputes. Good Lord! man, we 're six months behind in our orders!"

"What do you mean by in the ordinary sense?"

"Why should we pay twice as much as before the war for men who do only a little over half as much work?" he demanded. "That 's what hurts. Do you know that labor efficiency has slumped thirty-five per cent. in this plant in the past year?"

Employers in England, France, Germany, and Hungary complained to me of a like slump in labor efficiency. Over there the explanation I got was "war weariness." But was America in the war long enough to grow "weary"?

"Why the slump?" I asked.

"During the war," the manager replied, "the Government spread posters broadcast telling the working-classes they were 'it,' that victory over Germany depended on them alone. Well, that propaganda simply gave them a realization of their own power, and they 're acting on it. They work at the rate they please."

No labor troubles, but plenty of troubles with labor, I saw. Detroit emits a cry of industrial discontent, but it comes almost entirely from one end of the horn-the employers'.

I went on to another plant.

"Yes, we have a serious loss in efficiency," the president of the company admitted. "Almost forty per cent. in some departments. Cause? The war, of course. But I could n't agree that it is conscious shirking. Here's an incident that illustrates what I mean. The boy who was my chauffeur before the war came back a few weeks ago and took his old job. I'd had seven or eight different drivers in the last year, and now I congratulated myself. Ken was a good, skilful man; he 'd been with us for years, was like one of the family. But I realized immediately that he was n't doing his work as he should. And a couple of days ago he came into my library, deeply troubled. 'I want to work for you,' he said. "The wages are right, and you treat me fine; but I 'm

doing my work rotten, and I know it. I 've had about fifty jobs since I got out of the army, and either got fired or quit every time. Now I've got to quit you. If I don't, you'll fire me sure. I'm sorry. I don't know what 's wrong.' I urged him to give the job another chance, but he would n't. He's a perfectly honest, ambitious fellow; but the war did something to him; he does n't know what, I don't know what. It 's done something vital and destructive to a lot of us." He mused a moment. "Maybe," he said at last, "that very restlessness is the sign of some ultimate good. How can we tell?"

I went on to still another office, and here I got data about the alarming increase in the waste of material.

"For every dollar we spend on productive labor," the president of this third plant read from a report of his controller, "we must set aside forty cents for scrapped material due to careless workmanship." He looked up from the paper. "You can't discipline a workman any more," he explained. "If you do, he quits. He knows he can get another job right away, and you know you have to have another man right away, a man who may not be as good as he is."

This company builds one of our highest-grade automobiles; careful workmanship is imperative. Some time ago the company erected and equipped an apprentice school at a cost of $350,000. Here a boy got a course of expert shop instruction; he was paid at the full rate for work he did while training. The company figured that the school would pour a constant stream of expert workmen into the plant, men trained on just its type of work, and that these graduates would be attached to the plant by a certain loyalty, thus reducing the labor turnover. "Every time a new man comes on a machine, there is almost sure to be a temporary drop of efficiency on that machine," the president reminded me. "The first output of the machine may be unfit to pass our inspection, even if the man is a conscientious worker, because he is n't accustomed to our standards yet."

Recently, however, this concern found that its apprentice school was costing eight hundred dollars each for every

graduate who stayed with the plant. "Some of the graduates never entered the shop at all," the president said. "Others would stay a few weeks, then drift on to another plant. Sometimes they had no apparent reason for quitting, sometimes they went because another plant offered half a cent or a cent more an hour, for the time being, on a certain class of work. So we 've shut down the school. We could n't afford it."

It must be explained that the working conditions in this shop are excellent, and the wage-scale quite up to the high average in Detroit. In New England I have visited machine shops where a large number of the workmen have, as it were, grown up with the plant. Such a condition is almost unknown in Detroit. Few of the automobile shops are more than ten years old, of course, but you would n't find many mechanics who have been continuously in the same shop through even half of the shop's history. Workmen move restlessly from shop to shop as the mood strikes them or as this or that concern bids slightly higher. In a plant like Ford's, where multiple manufacture has been pushed to the last degree, so that most men's jobs consist in performing one very small operation over and over in endless monotony, the sense of attachment to the concern is naturally at a minimum. “Nobody would work for Ford's five minutes except that he pays a little more," a workman informed me. "Ford's makes a machine out of a man.”

Watching the driving routine on the assembly-floor at the Ford plant, one is reminded of the protest put into the mouth of the French workman Pierre, in Brieux's new play, "Les Americains chez nous": "L'économie des mouvements, le rendement maximum, le taylorism, comme vous dites-moi, j'appelle ça le terrorisme. Toujours et toujours faire le même mouvement, prendre un bout de métal par ci, le donner à la bête, en reprendre un autre et le lui redonner et toujours, toujours, toujours. Je vous ai dit que c'est à devenir fou!"

Later in the day I interviewed the manager of still a fourth plant.

"They're talking down in Washington

about restricting immigration, especially alien enemy immigration. Do you know what we 'd do if we were wise? We'd offer a bonus of a hundred dollars to every German workman who would come to this country and settle. One German is worth half a dozen Polacks or Dagoes. Dangerous? Nonsense! Think of the trouble the Germans in this country could have kicked up during the war if they 'd wanted to! But they did n't. The trouble was all made by a few hired agitators. The German, next to the Anglo-Saxon, is the best citizen in the world, and the best workman."

"What do you think of the League of Nations out here?" I asked irrelevantly.

"Oh, it's all right. We 're for it. And we wish those fools down in Washington would hurry up and ratify the peace treaty so we could cut loose from Europe for good."

You, Roberval, one of the few men I met in France to whom the League of Nations seemed a realizable or even a reasonable idea, how often you emphasized your belief that if the League of Nations was a reality to America, America could impress that idea on the world!

"The really important thing"-the manager came back with relief to more vital matters—“is the question whether we can get enough labor to fill our orders."

He, too, is swamped with orders. He, too, is crying for men, men, men.

Some of the results of this demand for men will astonish you, as they astonished me. And here comes a matter that has never been fully realized-the profound effect of the machine tool. It is n't an industrial effect only; it is ultimately an economic, social, and political effect, also. The same effects have been observed in Europe, I imagine, but probably not to the same degree. I am not saying, mark, that all jobs in automobile plants are machinetool jobs; rather, I want the machine tool to typify the vast majority of jobs in these plants. They are highly specialized jobs on expensive material, where the profit is high to the employer even at the amazing wages paid here, and they are jobs which may be learned in a

few days or a few weeks at most by any man of ordinary intelligence.

Now, why should a man dig sewers, even at seven dollars a day, when in a few days or weeks he can learn a job in an automobile plant and earn almost twice as much with half the exertion? The city government of Detroit has been offering seven dollars and more per day for men to dig trenches for sewers and water-mains, with no comers, or else with "comers that might as well be goers," as one city official puts it. Why should a man work for an ice company? Why should a man get up at three o'clock in the morning to drive a milk-wagon? People in Detroit complain that their ice and milk fail to come half the time because the men do not stay on the job long enough to learn the routes. Why should a man work on a farm when he, too, can get a job in an automobile shop and triple his pay? I remember that ten or fifteen years ago twenty-five dollars a month was thought good wages for a farmhand in southern Michigan. Eighteen dollars was often the year-round wage. One day a man who had been working on a Dakota ranch turned up at one of my uncles' farms and ask for a job; he wanted thirty dollars a month. "Go chase yourself!" my uncle exclaimed. "No mother's son 's worth thirty dollars a month." Now, farmers around Detroit and Jackson and Flint are offering seventy-five and one hundred dollars a month and board for help, also with no comers or else "comers that might as well be goers." A farmer near here told me that he is paying his man four dollars a day, and not only boarding the man, but the man's driving horse as well. "And he ain't worth shucks," the farmer added. Farmers in this district say that this year they 're going to farm only what they can care for with their own hands without hired help. This draining of the farm is happening everywhere in America around industrial centers, but probably nowhere so acutely as here. And the natural query is, What will happen if even one quarter of the country's farmers act on that principle this year? That again leads on to another question. If farming is a business, as its defenders

say it is, why can't it compete with other businesses in the labor market? Is the price of the farm product too low, or is there something the matter with the farmer? The man who answers that question must fix his eye on the machine tool and what the machine tool typifies. But is labor any better off in Detroit with all these soaring wages?

"It's harder to live on seventy dollars a week now than on thirty-five before the war," a die-maker at the Ford plant told me.

There's a curious compensation in these things. High wages draw swarms of people; a congestion of people brings profiteering in food and property values and rents. Government statistics show that the cost of living has gone higher in Detroit than in any other American city. And it 's not only the high cost of living, but the inability to find any roof at all under which to live, that confronts thousands of people here. Housing is a world problem. A distinguished Japanese told me a few days ago that it is as acute in Tokio as I found it in Paris and Berlin and Budapest, but Detroit has the worst situation of any city in America.

Mayor Couzens, the Jim Couzens of Ford fame, tells me he is in favor of building a wall around Detroit and keeping people out for six months, or, at least, of strongly advising people to stay away. "Of course," he said, "it would be hard to get the newspapers to handle any such appeal, because the merchants and their advertisers would n't like it." He added: "Human nature 's such a contrary thing, that we'd probably have twice as many people piling in here just to find out why we did n't want any more people."

Neither merchants nor industrial men can see the Chinese wall idea, but they have evolved another idea-"The Detroit Idea," the House Financing Corporation.

Once you called my attention to the impossibility of Bolshevism or any sort of revolution in France, because you are preeminently a nation of small landowners. Detroit's business and industrial leaders know that individual ownership is the surest way of making social and political conservatives out of their men,

of quieting the restless spirit that is undermining their efficiency. Besides, there is a real desire among Detroit mechanics, as in most American industrial centers, to own their own homes; the desire needs only stimulus and direction. The House Financing Corporation is a sort of specialized bank whose sole aim is the rapid building of houses and individual ownership of houses. The $3,000,000 capital stock has been subscribed by Detroit employers on the basis of $25 per employee for concerns having up to 500 on the pay-roll, and a decreasing scale down to $10 for concerns employing 20,000 or over. It is no more a charity affair than a bank is; it returns six per cent. on all money put into it.

To understand its working, let me explain how houses are usually built in American cities. A builder buys land and puts up a house or a block of houses, then sells them on the instalment plan. Suppose the builder sells a certain house for $6000. The buyer signs a contract to pay, perhaps, $1500 down and the remainder in monthly fractions. You assume, I suppose, that this $6000 is the cost of the house and land to the builder plus the profit he wants to get out of it; but it includes much more than that. Let us see. After the builder has made his contract with the buyer and received his $1500, his next move is to get all the rest of his money out of the house, for he is usually a man of small capital. So he secures a mortgage on the contract; for $1500, maybe. Then he takes the contract, with the mortgage attached, to a concern that buys such contracts and sells it, probably at an enormous discount, perhaps fifteen or twenty per cent. I should interpolate that it is very difficult to sell these contracts even at such discounts. As a result he may get $4500 cash out of a house that he has sold for $6000. The land and house may have cost him $4000. But if he had n't put the price up to $6000, he would n't have made any profit at all. Who loses? The buyer, of course.

Now, the House Financing Corporation is backing responsible builders so that they can erect houses rapidly. As soon as a builder finishes a house or a

block of houses, he can get all of his money out of them through the House Financing Corporation, and so go right on building. The price of the houses to buyers includes only building price, plus a reasonable builder's profit. Also, the House Financing Corporation advances to individual owners up to four fifths of the value of their land and prospective house; banks and trust companies will advance only one half. By enabling the home-builder to pay cash, the contractor in turn can pay cash, get material cheaper, and so make a better price on the house.

But it's in the promotion of rapid building rather than in the saving of money that this scheme has been serviceable in helping solve the housing problem in this amazing city. Despite complaints about the high cost of living, no one seems very much interested in trying to force prices down.

"People don't ask the price any more," a Gratiot Avenue merchant declared. "They just say, "Send up the goods.' A friend of mine was waiting one day in a cigar store near one of the automobile shops. During that time about twenty mechanics came in.

"Only six of the twenty bought twofor-a-quarter cigars," he said; "the rest took twenty-five-cent cigars." If capitalists smoke twenty-five-cent cigars, why should n't mechanics smoke them, too? No reason in the world; and yet this free, lordly attitude to the humble "fifty-cent" dollar is n't likely to decrease the dollar's humility. Rather the opposite, don't you think? You know, Roberval, what effect our doughboys' loose and easy way with their money had on prices in French villages.

Make, spend-that is the spirit of the moment. How dumfounded a French mechanic would be at a glimpse into the home of the lathe-hand I am just visiting. In the parlor are a new piano and an expensive talking-machine. In the dining-room a new and expensive set of silver dishes. In the kitchen a new electric washing-machine that cost over one hundred and fifty dollars. When the mistress of the house goes out calling or shopping, she wears a new sealskin coat. The master of the house rides to and from his work in his own automo