Here are four indispensable requirements--the maintenance of human values, the preservation of group integrity and permanence, productive efficiency and self-generated activity--for the building and successful continuance of economically sound unit groups. If society is to secure maximum returns, if the economic mechanism is to yield its largest quota of goods and services to mankind, the units out of which society is built must meet these requirements which constitute four of the essential pre-requisites to the success of any economic experiment. 3. _Centralized Authority_ Granted the desirability of efficiency in economic organization, the question at once arises as to how this efficiency is to be guaranteed. Up to this point the means adopted to secure such an end have consisted in concentrating economic authority in the hands of a small owning and managing class, and in leaving with the members of this class the determination of policy and of methods of procedure. The concentration of administrative authority at one point has proved impracticable, first because of the great amount of red tape involved in the handling of the endless detail, and second because of the resulting destruction of initiative and enterprise. Such a centralization of social function would be just as cumbersome as a like centralization of all bodily functions in the higher brain centres. If men were compelled to reason about and to direct each step, each movement of eyes or hands, each breath, each heart-beat, the attention would never pass beyond the boundaries of such pressing and never-ending routine. Many bodily organs, like the stomach, function involuntarily. Walking becomes habitual. It is only when the stomach and the legs fail to work properly that they become the objects of attention. The same thing should be true of a well-directed economic system. Each local unit should function locally and autonomously, and the problems of local function should never come to the attention of a more central authority until there is some failure to work on the part of the local unit. Those who despair of the future of society, and who feel that effective co-operation between social groups is impossible, should remember that the organs of the human body have been gaming experience in co-operative and harmonious function for hundreds of thousands or for millions of years, while the organization of society is an art that is still in its extreme infancy. The astonishing thing about the various social groups is not that they work so badly together, but that they work so well.