As you may know, the industrial equipment of the world is increasing by terrific momentum. The machine is spreading over the face of the earth like an idea new truth. And this is so notwithstanding the fact that the industrial equipment already existing in the world is so great that if for one year it were worked at ideal capacity the product could not be sold for enough to pay the wages of labour, to say nothing of the cost of material, overhead charges, or profit. Markets would be glutted with goods. Producers would be ruined. It follows that the pressing anxiety of industry is how to regulate and limit production in order not to overwhelm its markets. Its chronic nightmare is overproduction, meaning a quantity of divisible products in excess of the immediate sum of effective desire. Hence combines, pools, rings, cartels, committees, and associations of manufacturers, which the courts are powerless to prevent even where they are forbidden by law. These are a vital measure of mutual preservation. Yet they are but protocols of truce. They very soon break down and have to be made all over again. Control of production, save here and there for a little while, is a myth. It could be managed only in case there was a monopoly of machine-power. Once there was. There is no longer, and never will be again. Industrial production, taking it broadly, increases in an uncontrollable manner. The evidence is notorious, first in the efforts of national industry to increase the sale of goods in its own country, and then in the strife among industrial nations for access to foreign markets. A steam calliope jamming its way through the crowded street of New York City to advertize a new model of a popular motor-car at a reduced price is a spectacle to bear reflection. It is a symptom of saturation in the home market. When Henry Ford was making only a thousand cars a day, he did not advertize. There was a ready cash-demand for the whole of his product. When his output passed five thousand cars a day, he began to advertize on billboards and to sell on the instalment plan. As the natural cash-demand for a thing is overtaken, it begins to be pressed for sale on credit. At this point finance steps in. Credit companies with millions of capital are formed expressly for the purpose of lending buyers the money with which to buy. Desire shall be made effective. Selling on credit in this manner has latterly and suddenly assumed such proportions as to represent in the affair of business a new pattern. Some old-fashioned minds have been debating it as an evil. They attack it on the ground that it betrays the virtue of thrift. But thrift has ceased to be a virtue. To consume—to consume more and more progressively—to be able to say in the evening “I have consumed more to-day than I consumed yesterday”, this now is a duty the individual owes to industrial society.