over large areas, affected in an approximately uniform manner by any incident which at all seriously affects the industrial process at any point.[1]
As was noted above, each industrial unit, represented by a given industrial "plant", stands in close relations of interdependence with other industrial processes going forward elsewhere, near or far away, from which it receives supplies—materials, apparatus, and the like—and to which it turns over its output of products and waste, or on which it depends for auxiliary work, such as transportation. The resulting concatenation of industries has been noticed by most modern writers. It is commonly discussed under the head of the division of labor. Evidently the prevalent standardization of industrial means, methods, and products greatly increases the reach of this concatenation of industries, at the same time that it enforces a
- ↑ It may be noted in this connection, on the one hand, that a population which is in no degree habituated to the modern industrial process is unable to adapt its mode of life to the requirements of this method of supplying human wants, and so can derive but little benefit, and possibly great discomfort, from a forcible intrusion of the machine industry; as, for instance, many of the outlying barbarian peoples with whom the Western industrial culture is now enforcing a close contact. On the other hand, it is also true that even the most adequately trained modern community, among whom the machine industry is best at home, does not respond with fruitless alacrity to the demands and opportunities which this system holds out. The adaptation of habits of life and of ideals and aspirations to the exigencies of the machine process is not nearly complete, nor does the untrained man instinctively fall into line with it. Even the best-trained, severely disciplined man of the industrial towns has his seasons of recalcitrancy.
