essential success and healthy individualist thought; and that, unless checked, it means that these United States are riding for a fall. I will go further. I claim that standardization upon the present excessive lines in America is often a time-waster as well as an energy- and intelligence-waster. I claim that it is efficient only in a narrow and dangerous sense. And I claim, finally, that in these nervous, dangerous days, when personal initiative and quick thinking alone can accommodate itself to the kaleidoscopic changes in modern life and industry, standardization and the machine-mind mean ultimate disintegration and disaster.

Let us examine as dispassionately as possible the case for standardization.

The case for it, in business, and, to a degree, in education, is that it reduces "overhead", that it reduces costs by making the parts of machines interchangeable, that it makes the "superior" brains at the top effective throughout the organization, and that, in a word, it makes for smoothness of working and therefore for efficiency. It is claimed by the men who lead American industry that iron discipline, alone, working through unquestioning obedience down to the tiniest cog in the industrial machine, can reduce costs of production to a point that gives America a chance to hold her own in the world markets. The educator, and even the social reformer, are now beginning to make the same claims. An associate of the late Mr. Pierpont Morgan who, with that financial phenomenon, helped to steer America through her banking crisis in 1907, said to me as we stepped into our lift in a Wall Street office: "You see that man there?"-he pointed as he spoke to a department head-"That man once ran this lift. He has reached his present position because he did what he was told to do without question or criticism. In the modern army of business, we don't want the non-coms. doing the thinking. The men at the head do that." It never seemed to occur to my friend, himself a man of much vigor of thought, that a persistence in this policy must ultimately lead to the Marxian "slave-state," in which the official and "expert" would be supreme and in which the wheels, under the clammy hand of the Bureaucrat, would cease to turn. For the New Prussianism must lead ultimately to the very thing it professes to hate-to Bureaucratic Socialism.

And it will be noticed that the standardizer invariably looks at all questions, social and industrial, through the myopic glasses of "costs." "Reduce costs," he says, "at all cost!" I shall hope to show that the price he pays is heavy. I shall even hope to show that, given a lengthy period of mechanical standardization, that driving power of human intelligence and individual thinking which is the driving force of all life on the planet must necessarily become so atrophied through lack of use that, ultimately, a poverty of invention and foresight must send up the costs of production themselves.

Brain, both in quality and quantity, must always tell in the long run. Cæteris paribus, the country that develops its thinkers throughout the rank and file as well as among the leaders must always have a pull over opponents who fail to do the same, whether in the fight for the markets or in the fight for intellectual and artistic supremacy.

Now, I do not deny that, in the beginning, mechanical standardization of man and machine must and does bring its" successes”. It was the standardizing of the Prussian machine during the Great War which made it possible, as Major-General Robert Lee Bullard, Commander of the Second American Army in France, declared, for "the German soldier to equal three Allied soldiers in efficiency. "The German soldier was so full of discipline that he put out three enemies before he himself became a casualty."

But it was this very standardizing that left the German people helpless after the War, when, their gods dethroned, they found themselves flung back upon their own resources and initiative. "We are like a flock of sheep with the sheep-dog away," said one of their leaders, in despair in those first troublous days, "for Prussian standardization has destroyed our power to think, as a people." And it is only because of the very real vitality and capacity of the German, long submerged by mechanistic thinking, that he has been able to make the beginnings of recovery.

I am one of those who believe that American standardization has already reached the second stage that of the beginnings of inefficiency through atrophy of the individual initiative. If it be claimed that America is the richest country in the world and that, compared with individualistic England, she is more than able to

hold her own, the reply seems simple. One of the half dozen bankers who stand behind America's finance said to me: "We dominate the world of business not so much because of our own real efficiency as because, first, of our boundless raw materials, scarcely tapped, and, secondly, because of the inefficiency of our competitors, including England. The Englishman often does in two hours what it takes us three or four to do, only he is lazy and he does not concentrate, which lets us in."

“Our 'system' is constantly falling over itself,” said the head of a national Department to me at Washington. Mr. Bernard M. Baruch, who had charge of American industries during the war, told me that he was astonished, when he took over, to find how services were duplicated, from transport downward, and this under a supposedly water-tight, standardized "system". An ex-American Ambassador to Europe admitted to me that "standardization often resulted in the American chasing his own tail". But, despite individual pronouncements, America as a whole bows down to the "system", and great is its name! Like some of the political parties, she has fallen a hypnotized victim to a phrase, and has lost the power to see the thing that is as apart from the thing that was to be.

The essential weakness of universal standardization is that if any tiny cog in the machine breaks down, the whole machine comes to a standstill. Standardization always means crystallization. The standardized mind is inelastic, it cannot allow for unaccustomed strains. In a final sense, it is inefficient.

Let us see how this applies to the ordinary concerns of everyday life in the United States, as it comes to an outsider.

In one of the best hotels, I am awakened out of a sound sleep at 7.30 A. M. by a "bell-hop" who presents me the morning paper "with the management's compliments". It is "the system", and a costly one, for the "bell-hop" waits for and gets a tip that is five times the cost of the paper; and I lose my sleep.

On Christmas Day, a subway official at Thirty-fourth Street, when I ask for a train for One Hundred and Forty-second Street, says as mechanically as a gramophone, "Straight ahead." He, standardized to a hair, does not tell me that "straight ahead" will bring me to a "local", not an "express" train. Result, I am

about three-quarters of an hour instead of twenty-five minutes in the train, and so miss an appointment. But I see staring me in the face in the car a notice: "WE KNOW HOW TO SERVE YOU." If they do, they don't tell!

In the first class hotel where I frequently stay in New York, and where I am known to every employee, I am telephoned by a lady to the effect that for the previous three hours she had been trying to find me as she had been told by my hotel that "they don't know me and I am not staying at the hotel". She telephones half a dozen other hotels to find me, but finally, in despair, comes back to my hotel, when they at once say they know me very well indeed! The explanation may be a mistake in the index file, or a careless, rushed operator. I do not know, as I have rarely been able to find out "why the system breaks down". I only know that, to the standardized employee, "not on the index" means "not known and not in the hotel", even though the employee, as in one case, has just seen you asking for your letters! "He couldn't be, technically, in the hotel," said this young lady; "he was not under the correct letter in the index."

Still in the same twenty-four hours, I find that a letter from Europe enclosing some important and urgent matter, which has been re-forwarded to me at my hotel from another building, to which it was addressed, has disappeared. I go to the post office and set half a dozen inquirers at work, only to discover after two days that the clerk who posted the letter to me did not trouble to put it in the mail box but left it on top at the mercy of any stray passer-by in one of the busiest buildings in Broadway. One of the reasons, perhaps, why according to the post office authorities "six million letters were returned to the Dead Letter Office in 1925 due to the carelessness of the American people." When I complain about this, I am told that "everybody does it", because the standardized mind follows like a sheep what "everybody else does". And, indeed, I have seen lying on the pavement around the mail-box in Madison Avenue near the Grand Central Station, at Christmas time, some fifty odd parcels, thrown down, unwatched. "For does not everybody do it?"

And yet the very men who have introduced this mechanized system into America will complain to me bitterly that "it is

almost impossible to get men with brains and initiative to make heads of departments". Which is very like the Western emergency trolleyman, just fresh from Galway, who disconnected the conducting overhead rod "so as to save the electricity", and then wondered why the trolley car did not go! The Prussians of America are disconnecting the conducting rod.

The over-organization and hobbling of individual thought which is the essential of to-day's standardization is, I contend, a tremendous time-waster. It has seemed, even to the admiring outsider, as though in the United States everybody is engaged in telling everybody else "where they get off" and so fail to get off themselves. The very condition of all human existence is a certain amount of elasticity, and it is just that elasticity that standardized organization destroys.

A bank which I use when in New York for temporary disbursements offers an unfortunate but excellent example of this timewasting by over-organization. In London, my drawing account bankbook is kept automatically up to date by the bank and always shows the exact balance without any trouble from my side. But in America, I am forced by a most elaborate system to keep my own current account for every check I draw, bringing down the balance each time, and, in addition, as though to infuriate and exacerbate, each month I receive a yellow slip with a big account attached, which I am asked "to sign and return at once to the bank" as approving the balance they show! Of course I never do it, nor do many of my friends, for there comes a point where human nature, American or European, refuses to be standardized.

If I want a check cashed in America, I must ferret out somebody who knows me and bring him with me before I can get it paid over the counter. In England, all I have to do is to get an "open" check, which can be cashed without "recognition". The two words "not negotiable," stamped across the face, are enough to prevent any check payable to me in England being paid into any account but my own. In America, I personally have to make a long endorsement to pay to the bank itself to protect myself if the check should fall into the hands of a third party, when sending by post. I am told by the polite cashiers: "It is the system." None of them even try to defend it.