What has upset the idea of the old-style business man that he knows what’s what is that the relevant facts are no longer visible. The owner of a primitive factory might have known all his working men and all his customers; the keeper of a little neighborhood shop may still, to a certain extent, know personally his whole business. But for most men to-day the facts which matter vitally to them are out of sight, beyond their personal control, intricate, subject to more or less unpredictable changes, and even with highly technical reporting and analysis almost unintelligible to the average man. It is, of course, the machine process itself which has created these complications. Men are forced to buy and sell in markets that for many commodities are world-wide: they do not buy and sell in one market but in many markets, in markets for raw materials, in markets for semi-finished goods, in wholesale and retail markets, in labor [p247] markets, in the money market. They employ and are employed in corporate organizations which are owned here, there, and everywhere. They compete not only with their obvious competitors in the same line of business, but with competitors in wholly different lines of business, automobiles with railroads, railroads with ships, cotton goods with silk and silk with artificial silk, pianos with furs and cigarettes with chewing gum. The modern environment is invisible, complex, without settled plan, subtly and swiftly changing, offering innumerable choices, demanding great knowledge and imaginative effort to comprehend it. It is not a social order at all as the Greek city state or the feudal society was a social order. It is rather a field for careers, an arena of talents, an ordeal by trial and error, and a risky speculation. No man has an established position in the modern world. There is no system of rights and duties to which he is clearly subject. He moves among these complexities which are shrouded in obscurity, making the best he can out of what little it is possible for him to know. 5. _Old-Style Reform and Revolution_