Creative Impulse in Industry | Page 2

the army is made the test during this time of war. All
institutions will be examined and called upon to reorganize in such
ways as will contribute to the enterprise of raising industrial processes
to the standard of greatest efficiency.
The standard of mechanical efficiency as it was set by Germany was
one of refined brutality. During the progress of the war, the significance
of that standard is being grafted into the consciousness of the common
people of those nations which have opposed Germany in arms. It is the
industrial efficiency of Germany, uninhibited by a sense of human
development that has made her victories possible. It is that efficiency
which has kept a large part of the world on the defensive for over three
and a half years. Germany's military strategy is, in the main, her
industrial strategy; it represents her efficiency in turning technology to
the account of an imperial purpose.
But those organizations of manufacturers and business politicians who
believe that the same schemes of efficiency will function in America
will call upon the people after the war, it is safe to predict, to emulate
the methods which have given Germany its untoward strength. While it
is these methods which have made much hated Germany a menace to
the world and while the menace is felt by our own people, the
significance of the methods is but vaguely realized. It is probable that
after the war it will be said that it was not the German methods which
were objectionable, but that it was their use in an international policy.
Before the time for reconstruction comes, I hope we shall discover how
intrinsically false those methods are; and how untrue to the growth
process is the sort of efficiency Germany has developed. I hope also
that we shall realise that a policy of paternalism has no place in the
institutional life of our own country. Before the war these German
methods bore the character of high success, and they had a large
following in this country. There are indeed many thousands of men and

women in the United States, who, while giving all they most care for,
for the prosecution of the war against Germany still support industrial
and political policies and dogmas which are in spirit essentially
Prussian. The professional Reformer here in America is not even yet
fully conscious that German paternalism (a phase of German efficiency)
is the token of an enslaved people.
The German educational system as much if not more than its other
imperial schemes has been instrumental in developing the German
brand of industrial efficiency. The perfection in Germany of its
technological processes is made possible as the youth of the country
has been consecrated and sacrificed to the development of this
perfection in the early years of school training. Parents contribute their
children freely to an educational system which fits them into an
industrial institution which has an imperial destiny to fulfill. Each
person's place in the life of the nation is made for him during his early
years, like a predestined fact.
American business men before the war appreciated the educational
system which made people over into workers without will or purpose
of their own. But the situation was embarrassing as these business men
were not in a position to insist that the schools, supported by the people,
should prepare the children to serve industry for the sake of the state,
while industry was pursued solely for private interest. Their
embarrassment, however, will be less acute under the conditions of
industrial reconstruction which will follow the war. Then as patriots,
under the necessity of competing with Germany industrially, they will
feel free to urge that the German scheme of industrial education,
possibly under another name, be extended here and adopted as a
national policy. In other words as Germany has evolved its methods of
attaining industrial efficiency, and as the schools have played the
leading part in the attainment, the German system of industrial
education, private business may argue, should be given for patriotic
reasons full opportunity in the United States. If the German system
were introduced here, of course it is not certain that it could deliver
wage workers more ready and servile, less single-purposed in their
industrial activity than they are now. It was in Germany a
comparatively simple matter for the schools to make over the children
into effective and efficient servants, for, as Professor Veblen explains,

the psychology of the German people was still feudal when the modern
system of industry, with its own characteristic enslavement, was
imposed, ready-made, upon them; the German, people unlike the
Anglo-Saxon had not experienced the liberating effects of the political
philosophy which developed along with modern technology in both
England and America.[A]
[Footnote A: Thorstein Veblen.--Imperial Germany and the Industrial
Revolution.]