What is industrialism doing to us, then? Under this term may be included for convenience the entire system by which, in the period of steam and electric power--still a short one--goods are produced and distributed, and commerce and finance are carried on. This system, originating in the West but now spreading to the Orient, reorganizes human relationships in a manner that is almost revolutionary. It shifts populations from place to place; it dissolves old connections, and creates new ones, separating men who were together, and bringing together those who were strangers; it produces a large-scale consciousness of one another--ultimately, it seems, an almost feverish consciousness--but without ever making the reorganization of human relations any part of its main business. That is, the all-absorbing industrial system is not organized and run with reference to its main output, a changed humanity; we are not in business, as has been said, for our health; and this inversion of values, at first not clearly foreseen, or intended as a philosophy of life (but only practised), is now becoming a clearly conscious and, in the Western world, a generally accepted interpretation of our own worth. We are taking our occupations seriously. It is hard for us who are most close to the facts to see them in perspective. We are rarely conscious of the human movement in the large because the whole immediate human environment moves with us. But Oriental observers like Tagore and Gandhi perceive that Western civilization is developing towards a world-tragedy--pigmy purposes wielding the power of giants. It may be that we shall be jarred into something wiser by the jolts that are occurring within the machine itself. For the human factor is increasingly the problem-setting item in the industrial system. All the other sources of difficulty--the weather, the changes of the seasons, the supply of raw materials, the chemistry of industrial processes, the control of elemental forces--all these taken together occasion less anxious thought than the question, What can we rely upon in the sphere of human conduct? The puzzle of organization is personnel; the nightmare of the employer is labor; the riddle of labor is organized capital and its instrument, the manager and the boss; at the spear-point of practically every enterprise appears the opposing spearhead of sharper and sharper competition. Experience of friction is leading to modifications of mechanical processes and some improvements in human relations. But meantime, there goes on, by virtue of the inner logic of the system as a whole, an increasing depression of spirit, an increasing skepticism of the worth of human motives in their totality.