V
美国普通农场的浪费，特别是随着租约的增加，几乎与城市和城镇的浪费一样明显。有价值的农场设备被允许在田间生锈。当它最终摔成碎片时，答案只是再买一个。县里的代理人现在正在指导一场金属回收运动，应该可以从这些生锈的大块头被倾倒的堆中生产出数千吨钢铁。这是一种在全面战争期间我们无法想象的浪费形式。农民们已经被警告要订购必要的替换零件，以便工具行业能够衡量其对金属的需求。必须让旧机械在这段时间内发挥作用。
数以百万计的美国人想做的事情远不止这些。他们想知道他们如何能够做出积极的贡献。当然，在任何战争中，平民必须用很大程度的耐心来强化自己。他必须准备好接受来自上层的命令，并尽其所能地完成自己的职责。通过高层的规划，将有可能实现服装和鞋子的标准化，这将意味着巨大的节约。1918年，伯纳德-巴鲁克（Bernard M. Baruch）的战争工业委员会制定了这一模式。
Weapons From Waste
By Marquis W. Childs
FEBRUARY 1942 ISSUE
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VOLUME 169
NUMBER 2
FEBRUARY, 1942
BY MARQUIS W. CHILDS
WE HAVE been probably the most wasteful people in the history of the world. The luxury of the Pharaohs and the Roman Emperors was reserved for a small group at the top of the pyramid. In America it extended through a whole class, and the careless attitudes of a luxury-loving people extended far down into our society. We have flung away in prodigal indifference the storedup energy of geologic cons. It has been a long carefree spree with seemingly no limit to the riches at our command. There was an abrupt end to all that on December 7 at Pearl Harbor when American complacency was jarred as never before.
Today millions of men and women in every part of the country want to help win the war. They know that total war takes every bit of man power and every ounce of material that can possibly be spared and they want to do their share in the war behind the seas — the war that must be waged in every factory and home and on every farm in all of America.
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Our habits of waste are not so deeply ingrained that we cannot overcome them with a little discipline and a little organization. There is a bedrock of American thrift on which to build. It has been overlaid with a plating of shiny chromium but down beneath it is still there, a solid inheritance out of the past to be drawn on in this time of national need.
No Pharaoh ever moved with such speed and, at the same time, with such splendor and elegance as your average suburban business man when he left his home to drive to the station or to town in his new super-duper, hyper-triplex, early 1942 model. Think of it for a moment. Here is a machine costing from $750 to $2500, with a power of anywhere from 90 to 160 horses. Thousands of Pharaohs whirring along the high-speed highways and the great boulevards into each American city.
The lord and master’s children have been driven to school even though the distance was absurdly short, five or six blocks, a healthy walk for anyone. The family car — in a great many instances it was two cars — was used for the most trivial errands. We were in danger of becoming a legless nation.
It was not alone the irreplaceable oil deposits that kept millions of motorcars in motion. Behind the flow of traffic on America’s highways was an army of men, most of them young men. I have never seen any estimate of the amount of man power — in factories, service stations, oil wells, and refineries — required to sustain America’s 27,500,000 motorcars but it must have been very large. From this same army we must now recruit men to sustain our forces at war. For each man in the field, we have been told, eighteen men are required behind the lines to furnish the materials of war. One of our national jokes, a favorite subject of cartoonists, has been the number of young men who dusted and rubbed and shined your car when you stopped to buy five gallons of gasoline and a quart of motor oil. These young men will now be needed for far more urgent tasks.
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Copyright 1942, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
If the motorcar has been a fabulous luxury, so has the average American household. It has been a legend in Europe that the contents of the garbage pail of the average American household would keep a European peasant, his wife, and his children in health and comfort. Food worth millions of dollars and representing a greater real wealth in minerals taken out of the soil has gone to waste each year. Our food habits have been fussy. Often we have discarded the very elements that contained health-building vitamins. We have pared and polished and refined until not only the national budget of resources but the national well-being has suffered. Servants have been not merely indifferent but deliberately hostile to the idea of economy.
In the average middle-class American household there are machines almost as fabulous as the motorcar — the radio, the electric refrigerator, the mechanical washing machine that does everything but iron and sort the clothes. These machines have been treated with casual indifference, entrusted to incompetent servants, and ignored until a breakdown occurred. This has been on the principle that the repairman could always come running around, or that next year there would be a new model that could be bought on the installment plan. We have recently seen the results of a survey of what the repairman all too often does when he comes to fix the broken radio or refrigerator. He has sometimes replaced perfectly good parts with new parts in order to make his bill larger. Precious metal and precious time went into fabricating those parts.
Our children have been conditioned to the same carelessness. They too have been encouraged to believe that there would ‘always be a new one.’ Lights are left turned on all over the house. Electric current is cheap in America, but think what those lights all over the country add up to in energy cost. The outdoor Christmas lighting in the average American suburb has been gay and amusing, but consider the copper stored in millions of attics from year’s end to year’s end.
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This same prodigality has prevailed in the wardrobe of the average prosperous American family. With insistent regularity style changes have decreed new clothes when the old were scarcely worn. This was diverting, but it is a form of waste that we can scarcely afford in wartime. Too many American children have been totally indifferent to the value of the expensive clothes bought for them. They have lost caps, coats, mufflers, and gloves with happy abandon. It was annoying, but you could always buy more.
In the matter of service we have been pampered within an inch of our lives. Think for a moment of the great American pastime of ‘shopping.’ Shopping has been a recreation, and you debated earnestly, motoring into town, whether you would go to the movies or to Macy’s. You might look at those new electric mixing gadgets. The Joneses next door have one, and they make the most marvelous frozen Daiquiris. If you bought the gadget, as like as not you had it delivered in the department-store truck to the remote suburb in which you live. This has been one of the most flagrant wastes, a waste not only of materials but of man power. Consider for a moment the metal and chemical industries necessary to furnish the hundreds of thousands of beauty shops throughout the country. That means not only woman power in the shops themselves, but man power.
The average man in his office has been as much at fault in this matter of waste as the average wife at home. We have known from long experience the kind of conspicuous gadgets that contribute little or nothing in value. The engraved announcements, the embossed pencils, the chromium doodads, the blonde receptionists — all these have made for surface display, but on the balance sheet of total productivity they must be entered on the negative side.
They were part of the familiar American past, a lavish past which Europe never knew except as Europe enviously tried to imitate the American pattern. Germany, beginning in 1933 or 1934, and Britain beginning in 1939 had to curtail civilian consumption, but it was a problem on a vastly different scale than that which confronts this country today.
II
In Germany the civilian program can be traced back to the last war. In 1913 and 1916 house-to-house campaigns were thoroughly organized to salvage every scrap of material that could possibly be used in the war machine. The Nazi Party has provided an organization ready-made to reach into every German home for the prevention of waste and the salvaging of materials necessary for building munitions, planes, and tanks. For the Germans, faced with serious shortages of essential minerals, this was an absolute necessity. And the achievement from 1933 to 1939 was a formidable one.
The Hitler Youth order has been the chief organization used in the household conservation program. All German housewives were carefully instructed to save tin, aluminum, rubber, copper, bones, glass containers, paper, and any surplus fats. Each week, members of the Hitler Youth in full uniform called on each householder to collect the week’s savings, which were preserved and put aside according to instruction. In a police state, such as Germany is, those who failed to save were inevitably reported to higher authorities. Hitler’s young fanatics saw to that. If you failed to save, you must be a waster, and if you were a waster, then you were not a good Nazi. From that point on the abyss opened up. It was called a ‘voluntary’ system.
In industry all plant managers are required to turn over to official collectors on the tenth of every month each ounce of scrap metal that has accumulated. And the penalties in effect even before the outbreak of the war were so severe that no industrialist was likely to be absent-minded. Before the success of the campaign in the West, railings, lampposts, and all other forms of structural steel had virtually disappeared from the German scene. Looting of the conquered countries and the dismantling of the Maginot Line have somewhat relieved the metal scarcity in Germany. Down comes the Eiffel Tower. And at home the civilian program is pushed just as vigorously as it has been during the past seven years.
The civilian campaign against waste in Great Britain has been a striking success. For the most part it was organized after the outbreak of the war in 1939. It steadily gained momentum, and the results add up to a Startling total. It is estimated that British housewives saved during 1940 enough scrap metal to build an armada of sixteen thousand tanks, enough kitchen scraps to feed hundreds of thousands of hogs, and enough paper to fill a procession of one hundred thousand large trucks. This was the equivalent of one hundred ships’ cargoes from abroad, ships which could therefore be diverted to carrying other vital cargoes.
In Britain the salvage campaign was divided among sixteen hundred local authorities, each local authority whose district comprises a population of ten thousand or more being under orders to furnish monthly salvage returns to the salvage department of the Ministry of Supply. The collection of wastepaper, scrap metal, and household bones is compulsory. The reports made by the local authorities enable the Ministry of Supply to keep informed of the movement of waste material to industry. The money derived from the sale of salvaged materials is retained by the local authorities who meet all the expenses of collecting and marketing.
Housewives have been educated by radio broadcasts, government leaflets, newspaper articles, and house-to-house calls by volunteer organizations. Wherever possible, the collecting is done by established collection services maintained by municipalities. In small towns and in rural areas the Women’s Voluntary Services, the Boy Scouts, and the Girl Guides are doing the job. The manpower problem is acute in England today, and some municipalities have substituted women trash collectors for men. In their neat blue uniforms, the women are getting better results than men in encouraging householders to save waste materials.
Meat bones are processed in several factories, including one in South London which is the largest of its kind in Europe. Tin cans go through several processes which salvage the steel, the coating of tin, and even the solder. Wastepaper is pulped and used again, much of it in the munitions industry. Of the 600,000 tons of paper which yearly go into British homes, 250,000 tons were returned in 1940 for salvage, and for 1941 the total was close to 350,000 tons.
In New Zealand there has been an intensive drive for scraps with the slogan ‘Weapons from Waste’ blazoned everywhere. Exhibitions have been held throughout the Dominion, showing the waste products wanted and the weapons that can be made from them. In the first weeks of the drive ninety tons of nonferrous metals were collected, all donated in small amounts at convenient collection depots. Railways transported the collections to industries free of charge.
Even in Japan, where the very low standard of living has made waste almost impossible, a government conservation and salvage campaign has meant a saving of thousands of tons of essential war materials. This was applied particularly to scrap metals and wastepaper. Under strict government watch, Japanese householders are required to surrender to official collectors every snippet of material that is not actually needed to sustain a meagre kind of life. This has been going on in Japan for five years and more, and each year the screw is turned a little tighter.
III
Here in our own country a wartime government has only begun to apply arbitrary wartime rationing. With us it is for the most part a voluntary program, and if we draw on American ingenuity and American resourcefulness to make it succeed, then we may never have to come to the rationing that has been clamped down on most of the rest of the world. If we husband our resources, we shall have enough for all with a generous surplus for those peoples who until now have borne most of the burden of the democracies’ war against totalitarianism.
First on our conservation list are those commodities immediately affected by the war in the Pacific — rubber, tin, wool, Manila fibre for making rope, tea, sugar, chromite, manganese, and tungsten for hardening steel. At the top of the list comes rubber. The order which has been issued by the Office of Price Administration makes it certain that for a long period of time rubber will be available only for those civilian uses considered essential to sustain life and to maintain industrial efficiency. Rubber consumption has been cut to about one fifth of normal, and this means that there will be no tires for private passenger automobiles unless and until there is a drastic change in the far Pacific. And the powers-that-be in Washington are not encouraging the public to expect such a change.
The average life of all the tires now on American motorcars — that is, old and new tires all lumped together — is nine thousand miles. It is our job from here on to make each one of these miles a useful mile. It is a self-policing, selfadministering job which we can do through our own knack for organization, without the need for any government Gestapo.
A hundred economies occur at once. We shall have to regain the use of our legs. It should be possible with little difficulty to curtail the use of the family car by one third or a half and yet have everyone in the family show a definite gain in health and in temper. Communities everywhere, and particularly those out of reach of public transportation, will want to organize at once on a share-the-car basis. It should be fairly simple to work out for the average suburban community a schedule of private cars going at seven-thirty, at eight, at eight-thirty, with each driver driving, say, one day a week. From now on it will be distinctly unpatriotic to ride alone.
The same system can be worked out for driving children to school where there are no buses. Incidentally, commuters who live out of range of transportation by public conveyance will want to be looking into ways and means of getting such transportation, for buses have priority for tires while private passenger cars do not. Doctors can obtain tires for cars they use in making professional calls and so can visiting nurses, but this priority privilege is being carefully restricted by local defense councils who know local conditions and the truth behind priority applications.
At the present writing, there is no certainty as to what may be expected from retreaded tires. Retreading does after all take a certain amount of new rubber, and it remains to be seen whether even limited quantities will be available for retreading. One large company announced a retreaded wartime tire which could be used at speeds up to thirty-five miles an hour, but this was before the overall rationing order had been announced. Certainly in the past this has been a flagrant form of waste. Unlike the French, who had their tires retreaded just as they had their shoes half-soled, we deliberately ignored the thousands of extra miles that might have been obtained by the retreading process.
As was done during the last war, department stores can combine and coordinate their delivery schedules to save not only rubber and gasoline but man power. They can agree to stop the absurd practice of delivering a spool of thread to the outer suburbs. When it comes to man power, the savings are fairly obvious. The filling-station nonsense will have to end. I think it will come actually as a relief to the average motorist not to be besieged by willing young men clamoring for the privilege of wiping his windshield.
A word of caution is necessary, of course. Saving man power on the civilian side will contribute to national welfare and national morale only if war production is constantly stepped up and more and more men are absorbed out of civilian industry. Otherwise the effect on morale may be definitely harmful. Automobile production has now been stopped. Mechanics and even semi-skilled garage attendants were becoming scarce even before the auto orders. A more serious problem will be to find a useful outlet for the thousands of salesmen and other white-collar employees attached to the motor industry.
If most of the filling stations on the Atlantic seaboard remain closed from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M. from now on, it will be a net gain for our economy. Why not extend compulsory liability insurance, which would help to take off the highway many private cars that are today an economic waste and a social menace? At the same time this would help to keep money out of the consumers’ goods market.
IV
It is imperative that individuals and communities exercise their own diligence and ingenuity. In a variety of ways paper is vital to the munitions industry. Newspapers, discarded magazines, cellophane, paper bags, wrapping paper, and especially cardboard and corrugated paper, should be put away and tied in bundles that can be easily handled. Agencies such as the Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army have long since initiated the collection of wastepaper, which is sold and the proceeds devoted to the work of the agency. Where such a collection service is not available, schools could well organize a paper-salvage campaign, the money taken in to go for some school purpose. Church groups, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, numerous organizations already exist that could be used to excellent advantage in the salvage campaign. Wherever possible, of course, it is best to encourage such waste collections as have already been started. With wastepaper at sixty cents a hundred pounds there is a selfish as well as a patriotic motive in saving. Brown paper has considerably less value than white paper, but unless the community collection is organized on a wholesale pattern it is hardly feasible for the householder to do his or her own sorting, aside from tying newspapers in separate bundles.
A source of fantastic waste has been the elaborate packaging and wrapping that American merchants have developed. Take for example the tube of tooth paste that you buy at the neighborhood drugstore. At the factory the paste is put in the tube, the tube is put in a light cardboard box, and these boxes are packed in a wooden crate which contains light wood or cardboard partitions separating each box. When he receives his consignment, the druggist destroys the wooden crate and the cardboard that may have come inside it, at the time that he puts the tooth paste on his shelves. Then when he sells a tube of tooth paste, he wraps the box containing the tube in paper and seals the paper with cellulose tape or ties it with string.
We must learn at once to carry packages home and to carry them with only one wrapping and not two or three. Obvious waste in packaging and merchandising should disappear immediately. There is no reason in the world why a shirt sent back from the laundry should have an ounce or two of cardboard enfolded in it. Or six pins. The aluminum in cigarette foil has already disappeared, and the vast majority of smokers will gladly forgo that intangible freshness which is said to be sealed in with cellophane wrapping.
Under the salvage plan worked out by OPM’s Bureau of Industrial Conservation, state committees are being formed to which representatives of wasteand scrap-consuming industries as well as representatives of waste-collecting charitable agencies should be appointed.
The average middle-class household should yield a harvest of scrap metal if the householder looks with an appraising eye into closets, attic, tool shed, and garden. A first survey should garner outworn garden tools, pots and pans, doorknobs and locks, ash trays, window stripping, coat hangers, picture frames, discarded fireplace equipment, wire fencing and iron railings. A little rust does no harm. Then a regular collection should be kept of tooth-paste tubes and other metal discards.
Worn-out auto tires and tubes, rubbers and overshoes, old bath or sink mats, should be hoarded for the salvage collection. Rags are of vital importance. All cast-off clothing, sheets, towels, flour and sugar sacks, carpets and burlap bags in good condition, should be saved. The collector should not be called unless paper has reached a hundred pounds, which is approximately a stack of newspapers about five feet high. Rags, metals, and rubber should be kept separately, in bags or boxes if possible, and given to the collector along with the accumulation of paper. Needless to say, nothing should be discarded which is still of use and must be replaced by something new. That kind of excessive zeal means not a net gain but a net loss.
This, incidentally, raises a point of primary importance to the men and women on the domestic front. Out of necessity we shall learn to give far greater care to the expensive and complicated equipment of our households, since it will be almost irreplaceable for the duration of the war. For instance, electric refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and electric washers should be oiled on a definite schedule. Nor should they be entrusted to indifferent servants. Clothing, and especially wool clothing, must be given greater care, the amount of wool for civilian consumption having been cut by 60 per cent. And perhaps as certain chemicals grow scarcer we shall of necessity limit our recourse to the cleaner. Brushing and sunning are sometimes a substitute.
Two things the OPM specifies should not be saved at this time — old razor blades and tin cans. The amount of metal derived from razor blades is too small to make collection worth-while, say OPM’s experts. (That may change before the war is ended and I intend to go on with my own private collection.) Except in one area, and that on a limited scale, there are no plants equipped to salvage tin cans. We have each year dumped thousands of tons of metal on the nation’s smoking garbage dumps, there to be lost forever. Apparently nothing can be done to salvage waste cans during the emergency. The problem is very real, first, because 33½ per cent of our tin comes from Malaya, and secondly, because steel, a far more important ingredient in so-called tin cans, is needed for tanks and guns. The tin content of the ordinary can has been reduced to about 2 per cent, so small a portion that silver has been considered as a possible substitute.
Since metal cans cannot be salvaged, the objective is to use glass containers wherever possible. This means home canning and home gardens. Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard on December 19 announced goals for the canning industry for 1942 of a total pack of peas, tomatoes, snap beans, and corn 15 per cent above the record 1941 pack. It must be remembered, however, that vast quantities of food — in cans — must still go to strictly rationed Britain. Large supplies are necessary for our armed forces. Therefore, each glass jar of tomato juice put up at home will save not only the metal in a can otherwise bought from the store, but also the time and energy of a man whose services could be used otherwise. Home preserving in thousands of homes will also mean a material saving in rail transportation.
While the objective is to develop a million new gardens, the expansion program is being introduced cautiously in the hope that the mistakes of the last war can be avoided. Beginning gardeners are being advised against spading up the backyard, which very likely has a base of bricks and old tin cans. Many garden seeds were formerly imported from Europe, and while American firms have now made up most of this deficiency there will be more reason than ever this year why the amateur gardener should not repeat his customary mistake of buying twice as many seeds as he will be able to plant. Likewise sprays and fertilizers will be scarce.
Where school and community gardens are started, the Department of Agriculture has advised that they should be under the supervision of an experienced gardener who will know a tomato worm from a cucumber beetle. County agents are to be enlisted as supervisors in this war for food. The garden campaign is directed particularly at farm housewives who in recent years have more and more resorted to the can from the grocer’s shelf. Demonstration gardens are recommended to teach farm wives how to plan and plant for the greatest service in the Victory Garden campaign.
This suggests a major source of American waste. By way of the American garbage pail and the alley bonfire there has been destroyed enough humus material each year to replenish all of China. The outer leaves of cabbage and lettuce, carrot and turnip tops, cut flowers past their day, to say nothing of the leaves that drop each fall — all of this is precious. Now would be a good time to reverse that waste. Anyone who has a square of earth should prepare a humus bed. The grounds of coffee and tea make as good a leavening for a clayey soil as the expensive humus preparations advertised in the gardening magazines. If your patriotic zeal sends you into the garden, then use purchased materials sparingly, for they are scarce, and be sure to get the best possible advice on technique.
V
The waste on the average American farm, particularly with the rise in tenancy, has been almost as conspicuous as the waste in the city and town. Valuable farm equipment has been allowed to rust in the field. When it finally fell to pieces, the answer was simply to buy another. County agents are now directing a metal-salvage campaign which should produce thousands of tons of steel from the heaps on which these rusted hulks were dumped. This is a form of waste we cannot conceivably continue during a total war. Farmers have been warned to order necessary replacement parts so that the implement industry can gauge its need for metal. Old machinery must be made to do for the duration.
Food conservation and food substitutes within the home can help toward winning the war. Dehydrated fruits and vegetables that can be bought in bulk will save on containers. While it has a poisonous sound because of its Nazi origin, the one-dish meal once a week is not really a bad idea. It is not that we lack essential foods, since there are still surpluses of wheat and corn, but men, machines, and energy are required to convert the raw material into human food. And to sit down to a simple dish once a week would give every household opportunity to contribute to the common cause by a small sacrifice. As a matter of fact, we owe to the defense drive of a year ago a definite dietary gain that followed from the addition of vitamin B1 to the white fluff which in recent times has passed for bread.
The critical metal shortages have brought drastic changes in the materials available for household equipment. High-pressure cookers for canning are no longer on the market, and housewives who were not foresighted will now have to borrow from their more fortunate neighbors. A better method is suggested by the Bureau of Home Economics in the Department of Agriculture, which has recently issued a handbook on Community Food Preservation Centres. This tells how existing supplies may be combined for the benefit of all.
Rugged individualists will discover their own ways to economy. We could easily forgo overheating our homes to seventy-five or eighty degrees and thereby, it is a safe guess, reduce the number of winter colds. If wire coat hangers are not saved for the metal collection, they must be returned to the cleaner, who is already experiencing difficulty in getting a sufficient stock. We are a highly ingenious people, and now that we have set our minds to this task innumerable economies will occur which will not actually lower America’s living standard. It is merely that for the period of the war we shall have to sacrifice the frills and the wasteful excesses.
Millions of Americans want to do more than that. They want to know how they can make a positive contribution. In any war, of course, the civilian must fortify himself with a large degree of patience. He must be prepared to accept the orders that come from above and do his share to the best of his ability. Through planning from the top it will be possible to achieve standardization of clothing and shoes which will mean tremendous savings. The pattern was set in 1918 by Bernard M. Baruch’s War Industries Board.
While thus far little more than a beginning has been made, we must expect to see standardization extended very rapidly. As was done in the fall of 1918, colors of shoes can be limited and the introduction of new lasts stopped. Shoes can be reduced to standard classes which the trade, as in 1918, can agree to sell at the prices stamped on each shoe. The savings here are obvious. In 1918 one tanner who had been turning out leather in eighty-one colors and shades was able to simplify his plant to produce only three colors and thereby was saved the necessity of carrying in stock raw hides and leather to the value of many thousands of dollars.
Similar savings can be effected in the clothing industry. A limitation on the length of sack coats and the length and sweep of overcoats, as was imposed in 1918, will mean a substantial reduction in the use of wool. An arbitrary cut in the number of models of suits each season will not only save wool yardage but will reduce the number of trunks carried by traveling salesmen. The standardization schedule for the women’s garment industry, adopted in the fall of 1918, was estimated to mean savings of 20 to 25 per cent in yardage. Standardization of colors, together with certain restrictions in styles of sweaters and other knitted articles, released 33 per cent of the wool in that industry.
At the end of this year we are likely to look different than we look today. Less glossy, perhaps; perhaps more comfortable. The last war did away with the old steel-ribbed corset. If the rubber shortage persists, its modern counterpart, the lastex girdle, may follow it into the discard. Hatmakers will of necessity find substitutes for wool felt. The economies of the average American family which wall go so far toward alleviating material shortages will also make it possible to buy defense bonds and pay the higher taxes that 1942 is certain to bring.
On each and every one of us will fall part of the responsibility for seeing that wartime restrictions work. Ours is a democratic, a voluntary, society. The rubber-rationing order is being carried out by local rationing committees. Other restrictions will be self-administered in thousands of American communities. Pull and influence have far less opportunity of operation among neighbors.
All this implies a drawing together of Americans in a common purpose. The trend of modem life has been to shatter us into lonely fragments, and now the war has reversed that trend. Under normal circumstances each man has been interested in his salary or his profit, and the slight bonds that have linked him to our society have been chiefly those with others with the same profit motive. Outside his company or his office, possibly, in older communities, his neighborhood, the world has ended and he has been a stranger with the only link the impersonal one of the newspaper or the radio. Now he must feel with a sense of welcome participation that he is part of something bigger, part of a tremendous common effort. This is the cement that welds our society together and it will be no less essential in the critical postwar adjustment, after victory and peace have come, than it is today in the midst of the most far-reaching conflict the world has ever seen.