farmers, seamen, engineers, workers of almost every craft. But there
is no human authority presiding over this great complex of labor,
organizing the various units, and directing them towards the common
ends which they subserve. Wheel upon wheel, in a ceaseless succession
of interdependent processes, the business world revolves: but no one
has planned and no one guides the intricate mechanism whose smooth
working is so vital to us all. Man, indeed, can organize and has
organized much. Within a large factory the efforts of thousands of
work-people, each engaged on the repetition of a single small process,
are fitted together so as to form an ordered whole by the conscious
direction of the management. Sometimes factory is joined with factory,
with farms, fisheries, mines, with transport and distributing
agencies, as one gigantic business unit, controlled by a common
will. These giant businesses are remarkable achievements of man's
organizing gifts. The individuals who control them wield an immense
power, which so impresses the public imagination that we dub them
"kings," "supermen," "Napoleons of industry." But how small a portion
of man's economic life is dominated by such men! Even as regards the
affairs of their own businesses, how narrow, after all, are the limits
of their influence! The prices at which they can buy their materials
and borrow their capital, the quantities of their products which the
public will consume, are factors at once vital to their prosperity and
outside their own control.

A great business, like a nation, may cherish visions of
self-sufficiency, may stretch its tentacles forward to the consumer
and backwards to its supplies of raw material; but each fresh
extension of its activities serves only to multiply its points of
contact with the outside world. When those points are reached, the
largest business, like the smallest, is out on the open sea of an