PRE-WAR PRINCIPLES AND METHODS IS 
a craftsman in any sense, but is an animated tool of the 
management. He has no need of special craft knowledge or 
craft skill, or any power to acquire them if he had, and any 
man who walks the street is a competitor for his job. 
There is no body of skilled workmen to-day safe from the 
one or the other of these forces tending to deprive them of 
their unique craft knowledge and skill. Only what may be 
termed frontier trades are dependent now on all-around 
craftsmen. These trades are likely at any time to be stand- 
ardized and systematized and to fall under the influence of 
this double process of specialization. The problem thus 
raised is the greatest one which organized labor faces. For 
if we do not wish to see the American workman reduced to 
a great semi-skilled and perhaps little organized mass, a new 
mode of protection must be found for the working conditions 
and standards of living which unions have secured, and some 
means must be discovered of giving back to the worker what 
he is fast losing in the narrowing of the skill and the theft 
of his craft knowledge. It is another problem which the 
organized workmen must solve for themselves and for 
society. 
Under these circumstances the progressive degeneration of 
craftsmanship and the progressive degradation of skilled 
craftsmen seem inevitable. 
The movement thus described by Mr. Frey more than a 
decade ago has been intensified since the war by mass pro- 
duction methods, and the work of all-around skilled crafts- 
men in manufacturing and mining practically restricted to 
fields where machinery cannot be utilized. 
Practical RESULTS 
The period before the war, so far as wage determina- 
tions were concerned, may, therefore, be said to have been 
one which was not marked by the development and accept- 
ance of any new principles of constructive action. In aca-