The more primitive the machine process is—that is, the more nearly it resembles the petty handicrafts of earlier days—the better are the chances for survival of a bolshevist or fascist dictatorship. Where the machine technology is really established and advanced it is simply unmanageable by militarized functionaries. For when the process has become infinitely complicated, the subdivision of function is carried so far, the internal adjustments are so numerous and so varied that no collection of oligarchs in a capital city, however much they may look like supermen, can possibly direct the industrial system. In its advanced stages, as it now exists in England, Germany, or the United States, nobody comprehends the system as a whole. One has only to glance over the financial pages of an American newspaper, to look at the list of corporations doing business, to try and imagine the myriad daily decisions at a thousand points which their business involves, in order to realize the bewildering complexity of modern industrial society. To suppose that all that can be administered, or even directed, from any central point by any human brain, by any cabinet of officeholders or cabal of revolutionists, is simply to have failed to take it in. Here is the essential reason why bolshevism and fascism are, as we say, un-American. They are no less un-Belgian, un-German, un-English. For they are unindustrial. The same reasons which make dictatorship unworkable are rapidly rendering obsolete the attempts to reform industry by policing it. Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the legislative control for which the pre-war progressives fought becomes less [p255] effective. It becomes more and more difficult for legislatures to make laws to protect the workers which really fit the rapidly changing conditions of work. Hence the tendency to put the real law-making power in the hands of administrative officials and judges who can adjust the general purpose of the law to the unclassifiable facts of industry. The whole attempt to regulate public utilities in the interest of the consumer is chaotic, for these organizations, by their intricacies, their scale, and their constant revolutions in technology, tend to escape the jurisdiction of officials exercising a local jurisdiction. The current outcry against the multiplication of laws and the meddling of legislatures is in part, but not wholly, the outcry of old-fashioned business men demanding their old natural liberty to pursue their own interest their own way. The outcry is due no less to a recognition that the industrial process is becoming too subtly organized to be policed successfully by the wholesale, uninformed enactments of legislatures.