The real test will come when an issue is raised over the status of a given problem. When has the question of resource distribution ceased to be a local matter and become a world matter? When has the problem of credit become a world problem? To such questions there is but one answer: when these matters are of vital concern to more than one division or to more than one of the major industrial groups—in other words, when they pass beyond the control of one group, they are matters for world jurisdiction.
No plan can be drafted that will anticipate the difficulties of world economic organization. The utmost that men can hope to do is to draft a set of working rules that will enable them to act wisely when confronted by difficulties.
The world is still in a state of chaos. There are many local authorities, but no central authority. There are plans and policies, looking to the relief of the more pressing economic and social difficulties, but all of them are conditioned upon the establishment of some world power that shall prove competent to handle world affairs. Out of this chaos there must emerge, first, clear thinking as to the next steps that are to be taken in the reorganization of the world; second, a willingness to make the concessions necessary to this reorganization, and third a conscious purpose to build a better living place for human society.
VII. TRIAL AND ERROR IN ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
A society, like the individuals of which it is composed, learns first by trial and error. The earliest lessons that the human race received were obtained by this method, and all new information is thus secured. The numerous economic difficulties that lie ahead of the present generation must be met and solved by the method of trial and error, or, as it is sometimes called in political jargon, "muddling through."
During historic times men have spent vast stores of energy in trying things out. It has frequently been observed that man is a social animal. It might be said with equal truth that he is an experimenting animal. He is curious, he is venturesome, he enjoys change, he relishes novelty, he is eager to better his condition. Animals live on from generation to generation, building nests after the same pattern and migrating over the same territories. But man investigates, ponders, experiments, improves.
This principle of experiment—the appeal to trial and error—holds true of social as well as of individual life. The hunter tries out a new snare or weapon, the machinist constructs a new tool, the chemist works out a new formula, the architect creates a new variety of arch or buttress, the educator writes a new kind of text-book, the sanitary engineer devises new methods for securing and safeguarding a water supply, the statesman plans a new system of roads that will open up the rural districts, the social scientist draws the design for a new type of economic organization. From the most personal to the most social, from the most local to the most general or universal, human activities are directed over new fields and into new channels on the principle of experiment, by the method of trial and error.
The scientist or inventor works in his laboratory or in his shop, devoting his energies to investigation and research which are nothing more than the application of the principle of trial and error to the particular problems with which his science is confronted. Once the experimenter has discovered a way to compel mechanical power to toil for man, or to destroy the typhoid germ, or to talk across a continent without wires, the next task is to find a better way or an easier way. Far from decreasing the necessity for experiment, each new discovery in the realm of natural science opens the door to additional possibilities. To-day every important college, most cities, many industries, and public institutions maintain experimental laboratories in the various fields of applied knowledge, and employ highly trained experts whose sole duty it is to try things out.