of the labors of a medley of merchants, 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 economic system immeasurably larger and more powerful than itself.  There it must meet—­the better perhaps for its inherent strength and accumulated knowledge—­the impact of rude forces, which it is powerless to control.  Beneath the blasts of a trade depression, or some other tendency of world-wide scope, the authority of the mightiest industrial magnate, and equally of any Government, assumes the same essential insignificance as the pride of a man humbled by contact with the elemental powers of nature.

Sec.3. The Existence of Order.  The parallel can be pursued further with advantage.  Just as in the world of natural phenomena, which for long seemed to man so wayward and inexplicable, we have come gradually to perceive an all-pervading uniformity and order; so there is manifest in the economic world, uniformity, order, of a similar if less majestic kind.  Upon the cooperation of his fellowmen, man depends for the very means of life:  yet he takes this cooperation for granted, with a complacent confidence and often with a naive unconsciousness, as he takes the rising of to-morrow’s sun.  The reliability of this unorganized cooperation has powerfully impressed the imagination of many observers.