There are other great wastes in the existing forms of industrial management which, like the credit system, come out of the bones and blood of the workman. We pass them by to suggest that the industrial system has gone wrong, and can never go right, under the empire of steam. Steam is a centralizer. It concentrates industry, and by packing laborers into a small compass _enhances the cost of living_ and enlarges the area of losses on sales and of distress in hard times. And to go at once to our solution of the labor problem, we will describe it as decentralization. A writer in _MacMillan’s Magazine_ suggests that electric motors may prove to be the decentralizing force. Of course, it is not in the power of any material agent to effect great changes except as it coöperates with our inclinations. The expensiveness of steam machinery coöperated with our inclination to congregate in cities. We have congregated there. The larger half of our growth is in towns. The result is dear food, dear rent, pestilential diseases, moral degradation. When we grow sick of the experiment of building a modern Babel, our inclinations may coöperate with a motor energy which is plebeian and democratic. Let us suppose, then, that a workman can make any of the innumerable small articles which have iron or steel for a material. This workman has his bits of machinery and tools in his house. They do not cost more than a carpenter’s chest of tools. He has the skill; he has the tools; he wants power. But a neighbor tells him that he can buy in quart or gallon cans stored-up electricity, and by a little contrivance, which may cost fifty cents, he can attach his machinery to this democratic motor and be an independent workman, with all the advantages of machinery. He can make all these iron and steel contrivances in the middle of a prairie and sell them to his neighbors for cheap food and cheap rent. The _divisibility_ of electric power may make it the poor man’s friend. You can not buy five cents’ worth of steam; there is now no reason to doubt that electric power may be sold in five-cent packages if there is a demand for it in such form. There is a vast aggregate of small manufacturing. Of course there are great industries to which our solution would not apply; but if half the laborers of the country could work profitably, each man by himself, in his own house—just as cobblers work—then the strain on the large industries, such as iron and steel making, would be so far reduced that workmen in those branches would probably command, permanently, excellent wages.