The growth of the spirit and fruit of industrial democracy will not bring any millennium. It will merely make a somewhat better world to live in here and now. The dreamers of us forget that in the long run the world can move only so far and so fast as human nature allows for, and few of us evaluate human nature correctly. The six industrial experiences in this book have made me feel that the heart of the world is even warmer than I had thought—folk high and low are indeed readier to love than to hate, to help than to hinder. But on the whole our circles of understanding and interest are bounded by what our own eyes see and our own ears hear. The problems of industry are enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities of human understanding and sympathy. More or less artificial machinery must be set up to bring management and men in contact with each other to the point where the problems confronting each side are within eyesight and earshot of the other. Up to date it has been as impossible for labor to understand the difficulties of management as for management to understand the difficulties of labor. Neither side ever got within shouting distance of the other—except, indeed, to shout abuse! Many a strike would have been averted had the employer been willing to let his workers know just what the conditions were which he had to face; or had the workers in other instances shown any desire to take those conditions into account. For, when all is said and done, the real solution of our industrial difficulties lies not in expert machinery, however perfect, for the adjustment or avoidance of troubles. “Industrial peace must come not as a result of the balance of power with a supreme court of appeal in the background. It must arise as the inevitable by-product of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will.”[3] [Footnote 3: From Constitution of Industrial Council for the Building Industry, England.] Any improved industrial condition in the future must take as its foundation the past one hundred years of American industry. The fact that this foundation was not built of mutual confidence, real justice, constructive good will is what makes the task of necessary reconstruction so extremely difficult. Countless persons might be capable of devising the mechanical approach to peace and prosperity—courts of arbitration, boards of representation, and the like. But how bring about a change of heart in the breast of millions?