These, let it be repeated, are not a portrait, but only certain selected features; they do not fully describe any situation; they do not constitute an accusation of depravity. But no one who impartially surveys the human relationships that most characterize industrialism can deny that the impressions that have been described are being made by it, and are being believed with increasing generality. If we ask how this factor in the present disillusionment compares with the others--the Great War, the belief in evolution, the literature of irrationality, general psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis--we shall conclude that it is more influential than all of them put together. The reason is not merely that the War covered only a few short years, whereas experience with the industrial system is more than a century old; and not merely that science and literature reach only a portion of the population; there is a still deeper reason for the profound influence of industrialism upon our conception of ourselves. Wherever our voluntary activities, our efforts and struggles, are chiefly expended, there we get our deepest impressions as to the nature of reality. Men who through life spend from eight to ten of their freshest hours each day in the economic struggle tend to become conformed in their personal attitudes to the facts and forces with which and against which they work. They surely become conformed unless they take part in efforts to change the system. We do not understand even the pleasures of the people until we inspect their labor; the same is true of family life, and--more than we suspect--of religion. Not only is industrialism the chief of several sources of our disillusionment; it is the background source that either produces or gives popular plausibility to the others. It produced the War; it aggravates all the general problems of the family and of sex-life; it intensifies everything that makes us distrust one another and everything that makes us content to be selfish. Industrial efficiency practically identifies itself with a mechanization of life that leaves the least possible scope for the exercise of thought, and choice, and personality. When release from work comes, the imprisoned vitality of the worker gushes into a kind of freedom that gives one an impression that the real basis of life is simply instinct. If, as some suppose, a flood of sexuality has descended upon us, the reason will be found, not chiefly in psychoanalysis, but in such conditions of modern life as the industrial city. Granted industrialism, ramifying into the home, the people’s recreations, politics and law; industrialism, growing more and more efficient according to its self-secreted standard of efficiency, what should one expect but disillusionment as to the worth of human motives? “Gentlemen,” said a college president to some students who were bibulously inclined, “there is one thing in this world that you can rely upon--the morning head!”