If one cares to listen for a coda to the harsh symphony of industrialism, one can discern it in many sorts of effort to reassure oneself of one’s goodness. Promoters of one of our enormous wastes, competitive advertising, will tell you that strict truth-telling is one of the standards of their profession; and one can see them measuring the moral worth of the profession by this one minor consideration. When big business is under fire because of its exploitation of both employe and consumer, we are told that business is growing more moral because competitors treat one another more honorably. We need not scent hypocrisy in the welfare work of great factories, but why should kindness to dependents be offered as an offset to objections to this very sort of dependence? Rotarians are helping their communities in various ways from unquestionably good motives; I should be sorry if any word of mine discounted their interest, say, in boys; but why should business men think that such extra-business activities reflect any credit upon the system or have any claim to soften the criticisms that are directed against it? What we perceive here is men who are better, and want to be counted as better, than the system that has caught them and victimized them. But these “rationalizations,” if such they be, are less portentous than the infiltration of the principles of industrialism into the ethics that is generally recognized as obligatory. The major emphases in current practical ethics are the emphases that will not hurt the system. They center chiefly about two poles, property and contracts. It is well recognized that the American system of law is organized chiefly around property as the basic right, and at least one eminent public man has declared that unless we can somehow amend this foundation-principle it will get us into no end of trouble. Now, this assumption as to basic legal obligation has passed insensibly into an assumption as to moral obligation and moral character, with ironic results in our current moral judgments. Compare, for example, the intense reprobation of an embezzler with the entire respectability of a manufacturer who grows wealthy out of factory labor by children. He has not stolen property from children! Compare, again, our attitude toward dishonesty in making and fulfilling a contract with our attitude toward employers who have resisted with might and main every measure, whether proposed by a labor union or in a legislature, to safeguard the health of factory operatives. They are men of their word! Ask the next hundred men you meet what are the ethical obligations of business, or of employers, or of employees, or of buyers and sellers; you will not hear from five of them, probably not from one, a word about obligations other than the formal ones of honesty, respect for property, and fulfilment of contracts. The main issues--what property is for, what the main aim of production is, what constitutes success, the fundamental immorality of