Such a nation could dominate all others and could ultimately check the disorganizing activities of the well-intentioned but shortsighted reformers.
The higher form fits our highest civilization and national security, and the other is a direct step toward chaos.
Nevertheless there is almost a stampede of sentiment against specialization and its product—the large industrial organization. This stampede has taken many of our otherwise well informed people, and now we are seeing its extreme effect in the iconoclastic fever that is raging in Russia and elsewhere.
We know that the individual, the industry or the nation that specializes will produce the greatest results with a given expenditure of energy, and we know that all this plan of specialization requires a co-ordination of the work of all.
There should be brought about through specialization the highest degree of ability on the part of the executive officers, as well as the highest skill of the workers, and each man should have the satisfaction of knowing that no one on the face of the globe can excel him at his specialty, and furthermore that his energies are expended in the best way to produce value.
Many men have already realized this ideal. Many industrial organizations have also attained it in a very high degree, and while there was a trend of some of the nations toward specialization before the war, there was developed in America a spirit of antagonism toward the large units that had grown up as a result of this specialization. Not that specialization was objectionable, but that industrial supremacy of an organization was thought to be a distinct menace.
Since it is in these specialized industries that the individual should find his best opportunity to produce the greatest wealth for a given expenditure of effort, such organizations should be maintained and all others should be gradually changed over so as to make the most economical use of the man power of the nation.
We have found by experience that industrial organizations are successful if they specialize. We have handed down to us the saying that "The Jack of all trades is master of none". Our brains accept these statements, we recognize them as facts, but owing to one of the irrational traits of the human being, it is one thing to believe and another to practice. It is one thing to superficially know that it is important for us to specialize as individuals, and it is quite another matter to bring ourselves to act in conformity with this fundamental law.
The great economic gain or advantage possessed by the Ford Company, and many of the other companies in this country, is not due to the fact that they have selected a wonderful model that is superior to others in every way, but it is based on the fact that specialization makes it possible for the various officers and workers to become the foremost men in their respective offices. Specialization of an industry becomes effective only when each man continues at a given job or work. Shifting men about the plant is harmful, excepting in so far as it may be good to promote men from position to position to fit the development of the men and the industry. The plant can be wrecked by changing men from position to position without changing the product. It can also be, wrecked by changing the form of its product in fact any change, whether it is a change of the product or a change of the men, which interferes with the continuity of operation of a man along habit lines is an economic loss to that organization.
We have stated that each man should specialize in order to produce the greatest value for a given expenditure of energy—that specialization of the industries is necessary.