thinking of, instead, is efficient smallscale production of far simpler things: of flour, shoes, clothing, tables, and the like. And I am thinking of that production only on this basis: cheap power, locally available; machinery developed more and more to handle intermediate processes of manufacture; the necessary raw materials being common things, like wheat and wood and wool and leather, materials not needing to be hauled long distances before they are fed to the machine. I am suggesting, in other words, a decentralization of industry functionally for certain basic industries, as well as geographically. It is something by no means so probable. But, with a question-mark, it definitely deserves to be listed in a prospectus of the industrial future.

We reckon, then, with a possible revival of successful small-scale production in certain basic industries, a probable decentralization of industry through super-power, and a certain reduction of the necessary number of hours in a day's labor. No appraisal of the machine age which ignores those three factors is even half-way adventuresome in its forecast of a changing order.

$4

Of the three, a shorter workday, super-power, new machinery, only the shorter workday figures in conventional discussion of what is going to happen to our social system; and yet, of the three, the shorter workday depends most for its effect on changes in an all too slowly changing human nature.

There is a passion for predicting benefits to flow spontaneously from a radical shortening of hours in a day's

labor. One engineer in New York predicts the arrival of a two-hour day within the next sixty years. The prospect has its terror, as well as its delight. Four times as short a workday, and, probably, four times as many pool-room loungers, dime museums, and Coney Island midways. Likewise four times as many Sunday blue-law people seeking to prohibit all of them. One of the safest predictions about human beings is that the ability to enjoy leisure profitably and artistically will always lag two steps behind the chance for it. Changes wrought in people's conduct by cutting workdays to the bone will be disheartening in their slowness. Our comfort is this, that if ability to enjoy leisure lags behind its opportunities, at least it can never come without them.

Perhaps more evident from day to day to the human eye unaided by a microscope will be those changes wrought by super-power. It seems fanciful to suggest that there is an explosive engine in the world capable of breaking up our congested cities, or even of checking the tendency to build more of them. But super-power, distributed to all comers equitably, may accomplish nothing less than that.

Of the waste of life and effort in an overcrowded city, statesmen and poets and publicists have furnished many an indictment. But I have begun with engineers, and to engineers I hold. They are as explicit as the laymen. Herbert Hoover, for example, points out the "lack of adequate open spaces, of playgrounds and parks, the congestion of streets, the misery of tenement life and its repercussions upon each new generation." Open spaces are squeezed flat in cities, with lots of room outside. There is fifty times as

much land in Nassau County, New York, diverted into country clubs and golf links as into all city and suburban parks. And Nassau County is an average sample. Congestion in densely populated centers is an evergrowing problem. Raymond Unwin, in "Town Theory and Practice," suggests that modern cities can reach a saturation point where excess population, even from an engineering point of view, becomes sheer waste. Consider, for example, the waste in time and fuel of hauling people for tremendous distances via so-called rapid transit. Meantime, rents border on the impossible. A committee on the plan of New York and its environs finds that the cost of lodgings has begun to threaten seriously the security of family life. "New York's mad and illogical development, forced on it to a certain extent by prosperity, has resulted in such anomalies as a mile or two of East Side sheltering two million people, with thirty-two miles of wilderness across the Hudson only six miles away."

In the days before super-power (we are still living them to-day) the packing of people into limited areas was motivated by purposes of industrial production and intercommunication. But trains and radios and motor-cars take care of communication. And super-power may be on its way to handle problems of decentralized production, whether still mass production or production on a smaller scale. Even to-day the piling up of people in great cities is in part an artificial process; bankers and merchants and realtors fight to keep streams of traffic from being diverted to less congested centers. Usually, this effort to block the road to any sort of decentralization

is motivated by a simple desire for profit. But intertwined with that goes a certain American enthusiasm for the colossal. We boast of fiftystory buildings and tremendous hippodromes. Far from being regarded with suspicion, the promotion of more and more congestion in our cities is ordinarily looked upon as a quite laudable civic enterprise, contributing the dignity of size.

We shall not recant our reverence for plain hugeness overnight, but a new industrial era based on superpower might set new currents going. Not because of any appeal to reason or any "model planning," but because it becomes possible to live profitably in smaller centers of production, will super-power inevitably turn city populations more and more in the direction of decentralization. I am not suggesting a sudden exodus one summer evening, nor even an initial appeal to a majority. Probably, as Mr. Unwin suggests, "it is much less difficult to set up healthy tendencies [in town development] than at first sight appears to be the case." Movement on the part of two or three per cent. of an urban population, he believes, might be "enough to set up a decentralizing tendency so urgent that it would be difficult to provide for it fast enough.”

And here, it might be noted, this new application of electric energy would be working hand in hand with that new instrument of social organization, the coöperative society. So far, coöperative methods have been limited in this country largely to getting things produced and marketed, and limited also to farming populations; but cooperation among industrial producers and among consumers of all kinds is making headway. It develops local

leadership, federates new economic interests. Whether by producers or consumers, coöperation is a form of economic organization which tends to coördinate without centralizing the activities of individual and local groups.

§ 5

Super-power sends its voltage far afield. It may reach over into politics; for politics, like tenements, are suffering from overcrowding. It was on a well planned balance between the pivot of the circle and its rim that American democracy was originally constructed. The early Federalists presumed the existence of alert local governments vigorous enough to check a flood of power toward the center. Their ideal, as Walter Lippmann suggests in "Public Opinion," was "the self-governing community in a selfcontained environment." But the world they built on did not last. Centralization of power, that same centralization we have been discussing, bore down on it like a dreadnought. Self-governing communities, where the governors and the governed are neighbors, have given way to government by long distance, remote, gigantic, meddlesome. So complicated has government become that no one can pretend to watch it all. Most people do not try. Many do not even vote except on Presidential ballots. It is rather typical of our times that a certain Representative William Love feels it necessary to introduce a bill into the New York State Legislature providing for the ringing of all firebells and church bells on the day of an election. That, he declares, "ought to make people sit up and take notice call their attention to the fact that something unusual is happening."

Government is distant and confusing. It is burdensome as well. The delegate of the Kurdish tribesmen who came to the Lausanne conference in January and delivered himself of a brief ultimatum expressed sentiments widely shared throughout non-Kurdish territory. "What kind of government do you want?" they asked him. He replied:

"I no like Turkish Government. I no like British Government. I no like Arabian Government. I no like no government. I am farmer."

We are given, most of us, to invoking this vast bureaucracy of ours more frequently to check our neighbors than to aid ourselves. And behind the tinkering of reformers with odds and ends of legislation lies the task of somehow putting government back where the ordinary man will believe again that his vote counts for something, that he is obeying laws he really helped to frame. It is possible to dance about the edges of that problem with ingenious legislation. But the core of it is not political, but economic. A healthy decentralization of politics, in this country or in any other, is practicable only when some equally healthy decentralization of economics has preceded it.

Super-power, dotting the earth with new units of production, may quite conceivably plant in each of them the kernel of a revived, self-conscious localism.

There are, for instance, certain promising ideas in the field of engineering, linked with the technic of industry. We have an appalling problem on our hands in traffic terminals. James J. Hill showed us that fifteen years ago, and the solution is as far away as ever. Bring super-power into the picture, super-power as a decentralizing factor, and for once you have an alternative to the hopeless problem of finding five billion dollars for new terminals, then five billion more, and then another five, only to find that new terminals are out of date by the time they are constructed.

Again, super-power makes it possible to run factories as they should be run, from an engineering point of view, with power production entirely separate from production of boots or breakfast food or clothing, and therefore more economical. As Steinmetz has pointed out: "The best efficiency requires the separation of power production, just as that of any other raw material. In the days of the steamengine the two industries were carried on under the same roof. That is inefficient and wasteful." Meantime super-power also makes possible a consideration of the motive power cost of a year's operations as virtually a fixed element, something now beyond the power of the engineer. Simultaneously it reveals, with its economies, a more rational approach to the much discussed and little heeded conservation of our natural resources.

Nor, in the wider field of social changes, do a decentralizing influence upon industry and perhaps a partial recapture of politics from the high heavens to which they 've flown by

ahead. Super-power may put its impress on such a thing as education. To-day our most pitiful effort here is the one-room country schoolhouse. A single teacher tries to instruct eight different grades of pupils simultaneously. How woefully she fails is testified by the vim with which a dozen States are launching programs for new centralized schools, with motor-buses gathering children from a hundred farms and bringing them to one modern building. Within limits the plan works effectively. But there are districts beyond its reach-districts that will remain inaccessible until new centers of production, such centers as we have conceived, come along to serve as focal points.

Super-power, again, may help us with the problem of migratory labor. That is a real problem, no matter how obscured. A million men and women, homeless, unattached to any civic interest, offcasts of a careless economic system, wander up and down the country with the seasons. They bring into the world children who will have neither schooling nor the heritage of home. And no reorganization of society can touch them which does not reorganize the forces of production. For they are sacrificed to an irony that rotates crops, but, with the modern factory system centralized in large cities, leaves no work for them between rotations. Once the wheat crop of the plains is in, there is no work on the farms or near the farms that needs them. East or West they drift to some new harvest, California oranges, Texas cotton, Montana timber-jacking, apples on the hills of Oregon.

Probably there is no factor that can affect this situation short of our decen

tralization. Wheat and oranges and cotton cannot be made to grow in the same soil, or ripen so evenly by calendar that they will furnish steady labor twelve months in the year. But with new centers of industrial production made practical by cheap power, the "migratory labor problem" assumes a different form. It is possible to conceive men working in the fields when ripe crops are due, then turning back to factories near at hand. Nor should it be assumed that doubling in this fashion is impossible. Tractors and machinery, coöperative farming, can materially reduce the time required for sowing crops and reaping them. Ford manages the work on his threethousand-acre farm in one month a year. Meantime, on the factory side, we know that not one of our major industries runs at top speed all the year around. Shoe factories are idle one day in every three; garment factories, one day in three; mines, two days in every five. That idleness is itself a hardship for another group of workers. But put new productive centers within striking distance of crops that need reaping, and with an instrument far more effective than social legislation or the trumpeting of "back to the land" you attack realistically, both ends at once, the two problems of seasonal employment and migratory labor.

$7

I have called this paper "TwentiethCentury Medievalism." That is fanciful, but on the whole the phrase may justify itself. From most of us "medievalism" wrings the protest: "What! give up bath-tubs? Go back to moats and wooden plows?" I am not thinking of an adventure so unlikely. The

essential characteristic of medievalism, as I have used the word, is the grouping of life around local centers built on no fictitious aspirations for a model settlement, but on the real vitality of a substantial economic interest. Centers, I suggest, with relationships personal enough to make life more interesting, problems small enough to be dealt with decently.

Beyond these possibilities lie others more remote and more engaging: a chance, with new machinery, to put the spice of more variety into a day's labor; a new diversity in culture between one community and another, the result of each one more nearly self-sufficient in itself; new provocation to experiment, perhaps new opportunities for creative effort.

I have not gone this far. I have suggested simply an industrial system increasingly decentralized, a political enigma lit up here and there with shafts of local interest-seasonal employment, schools, and migratory labor, all less and less the burden of the evangelist, and more the problem of the engineer. What I have avoided is the premise of any sudden metamorphosis in human nature, or the presumption that men will do things they do not want to do because of some one else's moral indignation.

I have not talked about the rules of life; conservatives and radicals will still have those to deal with. I have not talked about spanning a wide gap between environment and understanding, a problem for the social scientist. Here I have been thinking simply of the environment itself, of the weight and size and shape of all those pawns and castles for whose movements rules are made, and with which, under any rules, the game of life is played.