I asked Prof. Giddings to go beyond economics and to consider the war's probable results in their broader sociological aspects.
"If what I have predicted happens," he replied, "the democratic elements of society in all nations will become apprehensive of the loss of liberty.
"They will fear that in the interests of efficiency the perfected social order will impose minute and unwelcome regulations upon individual life and effort, and that a degree of coercive control will be established which will end by making individuals mere cogs in the machine, diminishing their importance, curtailing their usefulness and initiative far more than is done by the great industrial corporations against which the working classes already are protesting so loudly.
"And not only the working people but a large proportion of all other classes will develop these fears, especially in those nations which, during the last century, have built up popular sovereignty and democratic freedom, as the terms are understood in England and America.
"We shall hear the argument that the loss of individual initiative and personal self-reliance is too great a price to pay even for supreme efficiency and the maximum production of material comforts.
"The problem which such a conflict of interests and opinions will present may be speculatively defined as that of trying to find a way to reconcile a maximum of efficiency organization with a maximum of individual freedom.
"So stating it, we have to recognize that this has been the biggest problem, in fact the comprehensive problem, that man, has faced throughout human history, and the one which, really, he has been trying to solve by the trial and error method in all his social experiments.
"It is the sociological as distinguished from the merely economic problem.
"Human society exists because early in his career man discovered that mutual aid, or team work, is, on the whole, in the struggle for existence and the pursuit of happiness, a more effective factor than physical strength or individual cleverness.
"Natural selection has acted not only upon individuals, but, in the large sense, upon groups and aggregates of groups. The restrictions upon individual life have developed in the interests of groups, or collective efficiency.