Yet it is not possible to take a roseate view of the pressure of industrialism upon the spirit of either employe or employers and financiers. A man who was subsisting upon the borderline between worker and employer had opportunity for gain by a shady transaction. It consisted in taking surreptitious advantage of a municipality in such a way that permanent gain would accrue to a corporation with which he was “in cahoots.” He laughed at scruples, saying, “I’m going to get mine while the getting is good. They’re all doing it.” Of course it isn’t true that all are doing it, but will anyone deny that the system in which both worker and capitalist have become enmeshed exercises upon both of them a gravitational pull away from the wholesome motives that have been named in this and the preceding sections, and towards a narrow-minded policy of _getting_ simply as such? Industrialism in its present form unquestionably pushes into the background the motives of concrete well-living, and brings into the foreground a desire for “efficiency” or “results” as measured by a mechanical or abstract standard. Both employer and employe feel impelled to get the most possible out of each other, for the system as such (and its leaders insist that its “as-suchness” is both natural and reasonable) has no inherent reference to a possible mutuality in well-living for all concerned. Well-living is not the job of business or of industry, least of all mutual well-living; instead, conflict of interests is assumed to be basic and permanent. In this assumed conflict of interests, possession is the objective. Hence the employer, since he already has possessions, which mean power, has an advantage which the worker sees no way to offset except by arbitrary action or inaction. Hence effort to “get by” with the least exertion; mechanized listlessness; loss of heart (“I’m not going to strain myself in order to increase his profits”); the warlike strategy of the union; resentment when defeated in this game of “get”; and, when conflict reaches a climax, resort to force. And, in and through all, the Tempter whispering that class-interest is a finality in our organized life, and that force is the final arbiter of everything. This on the side of labor; and, on the side of capital, parallel abstraction from the more vital enjoyments, parallel drying and hardening of the mental tissue, and final resort to cunning and force. There is scarcely a mean motive, apart from brutal lust, that does not now come into play upon both sides. And yet, the same men, both employers and employes, are partly actuated in their economic activities by motives that culminate in religion! XVII ECONOMIC PRODUCTION AS A MODE OF SELF-REALIZATION