Yet the very thing which makes an advanced industrial organization too complex to be directed by a dictatorship, or to be policed by democratic politicians, is forcing the leaders of industry to evolve forms of self-control. When I say that they are being forced to do this I am not referring to those ostentatiously benevolent things which are done now and then as sops to Cerberus. There is a certain amount of reform undertaken voluntarily by men who profess to fear ‘bolshevism,’ and if not bolshevism, then Congress. That is relatively unimportant. So also is the discovery that it pays to cultivate the good will of the public. What I am referring to is the fact that the [p256] sheer complexity of the industrial system would make it unmanageable to business men, no less than to politicians or dictators, if business men were not learning to organize its control. It is the necessity of stabilizing their own business, of directing technical processes which are beyond the understanding of stockholders, of adjusting the supply and demand of the multitudinous elements they deal in, which is the compelling force behind that divorce between management and ownership, that growing use of experts and of statistical measurements, and that development of trade associations, of conferences, committees, and councils, with which modern industry is honeycombed. The captain of industry in the romantic sense tends to disappear in highly evolved industrial organizations. His thundering commands are replaced by the decisions of executives who consult with representatives of the interests involved and check their opinions by the findings of experts. The greater the corporation the more the shareholders and the directors lose the actual direction of the institution. They cannot direct the corporation because they do not really know what it is and what it is doing. That knowledge is subdivided among the executives and bureau chiefs and consultants, all of them on salary; each of them is so relatively small a factor in the whole that his personal success is in very large degree bound up with the success of the institution. A certain amount of jealousy, intrigue, and destructive pushing, of office politics, in short, naturally prevails, men being what they are. But as compared with the old-style business man, the ordinary executive in a great corporation is something quite strange. He is [p257] so little the monarch of all he surveys, his experience is so continually with stubborn and irreducible facts, he is so much compelled to adjust his own preferences to the preferences of others, that he becomes a relatively disinterested person. The more clearly he realizes the nature of his position in industry, the more he tends to submit his desires to the discipline of objective information. And the more he does this the less dominated he is by the acquisitiveness of immaturity. He may on the side gamble acquisitively in the stock market or at the race track, but in relation