industrial power. The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded
the simple belief that "all men are born free and equal." Political
power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their
supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied
themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and
practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to
meet the complex problems that grew out of it.

Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation
of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and
development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an
instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and
to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it
presented. But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine
era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new
situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or
economic weapons.

The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and
America called into being a new type of working-class. Machines were
at first termed "labor-saving devices." In reality, as we now know,
mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and
increasingly enormous demand for "labor." The omnipresent and still
existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine
production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and
exploitable populations. Large production and the huge development of
international trade through improved methods of transport, made
possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly
increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout
Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to