The gradual secularization of economics through the growing complexity of commercial relations has been a previous interest of our study. When it became inconvenient and difficult to make simple moral standards, expressed in prohibitions of usury and maintenance of a “just price,” fit the new intricacies of international commerce and industrial production, we have seen how men turned naturally and inevitably to the consoling reflection that “in the providence of God life is so arranged that each man seeking his own shall serve the common weal.” The doctrine of laissez faire was in other words as much an admission of defeat on the part of the moral forces of society as it was a conscious effort toward secularization. Other factors beside a growing complexity of social life helped however to secularize modern society. Modern commerce and industry tend to increase the extent of coöperative effort while they diminish personal contacts. World commerce and large-scale production make human beings interdependent without offering them the opportunity of entering upon personal associations. There is a natural sympathy in the soul which saves men from actions which are very obviously detrimental to their fellows. But if they are unable to survey the consequences of their actions or to gauge the reactions to their attitudes in the lives of others, their temptation to unethical conduct is materially increased. The master of a manufacturing unit in the old handcraft period of industry thus found it much easier to maintain moral relations to his workers than a modern, frequently absentee, owner of a large factory. If in addition ownership becomes collective, with the resulting division of responsibility, while the number of workers increases until individuals lose their significance in the mass, the problem of making industrial relations ethical is further complicated. Ethical conduct is, in its last analysis, based upon reverence for personality; and personality fails to make its appeal to the conscience when considered in the mass and when regarded at too long range. In such circumstances a degree of intelligence and imagination, which mankind has not yet achieved, is required to gauge the effect of industrial and commercial policy upon the individuals who are involved in it. The unethical nature of modern civilization with its destruction of confidence in the moral integrity of human nature and with its deterministic obsessions is largely due to its mechanical perfections which have increased the extent of social coöperation while they have decreased personal contacts.