The challenge to democracy VIII. The machine and democracy

The subject of modern industrialism presents itself as an especially significant subject to explore in connection with the many-sided challenge to democracy inasmuch as it is the peculiar dominating force in the economic life of our time. Travel to Europe or to Asia or to the uttermost parts of the earth and you will discover that if not the belching smokestacks o f the factory then at least mechanical implements and other products of the factory are in use among the people for their happiness or their misery. It is here in the complicated realm of material necessities and of wealth, the realm of economic life, that the strongest mainsprings of human action lie, and it is in economic disorder that the gravest political disorders of our society are generated