To meet the crisis there is an unanimous cry for a resumption of production, and for a vastly augmented output through increased efficiency and more intensive methods, but the crying is in vain, for meanwhile the working element has entered on a course of restriction that will inevitably nullify every effort at increasing the output. Partly through its pre-war victories in the contest with capital, partly through the abnormal wage returns brought into being through the desperation of the managers of the war, labour is now successfully engaged in the work of cutting down production far below what it was even ten years ago, both by reducing the hours of work and by vastly augmenting the wage. The actual productivity of a “labour unit” today is less than at any time since industrialism became the controlling element in life, and in many categories it is less and less productive of satisfactory results. Under these conditions it is hard to see just how the reconstructionists expect to obtain that greatly increased output they admit is the only visible hope of saving the world from bankruptcy, chaos and barbarism. The contest is an unfair one, for the entrance of Bolshevism has added a new factor hitherto unknown. Enraged by the failure of strikes and other war measures to improve their condition, labour is increasingly turning to the small minority of avowed revolutionists who proclaim the rather obvious fact that so long as industry is engineered by the two antagonistic forces of capitalism and proletarianism, no permanent improvement in the state of the latter is possible. Every increase in wages is followed automatically by a greater increase in the cost of living, and the ratio today between a wage of eighty cents an hour and the cost of food, clothing and shelter, is less advantageous than was the case when this sum represented not a wage per hour, but per day. The reason for this state of things is not thought out with any particular degree of exactness, and the leap is made in the dark to revolution, confiscation and, of late, to Bolshevism. The ease with which an insignificant, alien and unscrupulous minority has succeeded in destroying society in Russia and Hungary, and the apparent ease with which the same theory has almost been carried out in Germany, and may be carried out in France and Italy--not to speak of North Dakota--has aroused all the latent savagery and the impulse to revolt in large sections of the working classes, but it has also completely terrorized the politicians if not the capitalists themselves, and the menace of anarchy is met cringingly and half-heartedly. It has even acquired a strong if somewhat veiled defence among contemporary directors of human destiny.