The masses of the people in industrial countries have abandoned their farms, their villages and their rural life, have moved into the cities, and have gone to work in the mines, factories, mills, stores and offices, very much as the mechanics and farmers dropped their accustomed tools and rushed to the gold fields of California and Australia. Within two or three generations the whole basis of life has been shifted and a new order has been established. This change has been made for the purpose of securing a better living. The people in the industrial countries have accepted capitalism as an essentially desirable means of gaining a livelihood. The new order has given them an opportunity for mass living that has been reserved in the past for a small percentage of the people. It has provided an immense number of things, for the most part inconsequential and tawdry, but things nevertheless which would appeal to the possessive instincts of those who had never enjoyed many possessions. The new order has made each family in an industrial district doubly dependent--dependent on a job which it can in no wise control, and dependent on the economic mechanism for the supply of goods and services without which mass city life is quite impossible. The rural family had a supplementary source of living in its chickens, pigs, cows, goats, bees and garden. Fuel was cheap and nature provided berries, nuts and game. Life was rough, but the means of maintaining it were relatively abundant. City life has cut away almost all of these forms of supplementary income, at the same time that it has imposed upon the family the need to pay for practically all goods and services. The city breadwinner must get and hold a job, if his family is to live. Mass life in cities, mass work in factories, job-dependence--all of these experiments are being made in a field that up to the present time has been virtually untouched by the human race. Mankind has gone into these experiments hopefully, trustingly, blindly, without any guarantee of their workability. A casual examination of the premises on which the capitalist experiment is built will show the extremely precarious position in which the people who are dependent upon it now find themselves. The capitalist experiment is built on the assumption that competition rather than co-operation is the effective means of promoting social well-being. Acting under this theory, each man is to forage for himself. This individual activity was relied upon to promote initiative and to stimulate ambition. In practice, capitalist society has been compelled to abandon competition in many of its aspects. Monopoly is the opposite of competition, yet the modern capitalist world is full of monopoly because monopoly pays better than competition--it is a more workable economic scheme.