222 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND WAGES 
In this American philosophy you may find economic chiv- 
alry by looking for it. If you do, it is implicit there. The 
conscious view is still pragmatic. Any other is obscured in a 
curious way. Long before, this state of society had been 
imagined, in which the desire for private gain as the para- 
mount economic motive should yield to the idea of social 
function; but nobody had ever imagined it would really pay. 
THE ESSENCE oF THE NEW INDUSTRIAL ORDER 
Corroborative citations as to the attitude of mind and 
principles of action of American trade, industry, and 
finance might be greatly multiplied. No such basis of 
proof, however, is necessary. The new order hds become 
a commonplace. Industry itself has even passed the point 
of being conscious of the revolutionary changes in thought 
and procedure which have occurred during the past five 
years. The old order of thinking and action has practically 
been forgotten. 
The employer now has come to sed the wage-earner as a 
consumer as well as a producer. The workers themselves 
and their leaders have had the vision of their real signifi- 
cance as producers, and of the relation of their possibilities 
in economic and social well-being to their productivity. 
Financiers, captains of industry and the leaders of or- 
ganized labor have accepted the fact that their mutual in- 
terests lie in increasing industrial output, reducing costs, 
and stimulating consumption and profits by better service 
and lower prices. The net result has been that the em- 
ployer, realizing that the continuing profitableness of in- 
dustry is dependent upon an expansion in purchasing 
power, has willingly accepted and declared that there may 
be indeterminate wage-increases as long as costs are not in- 
creased and the proper margin of profit is maintained. 
Organized labor has also given its adherence to this point