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grew in virulence as a social irritant. What we see in Germany,therefore, was an economic order that functioned better than inany continental country but which failed to produce enough purchasingpower to provide all her people with the means of obtaininga decent share of that production while the system bore withinits body some little-understood organism which at intervals broughtthe whole community to distress. There was nothing new aboutthis. The history of the present economic system in any form is ahistory of recurring crises. But it is a fact that in the last fifty years,as the capacity to produce rose and the well-being of the peopleimproved and the problem of production seemed almost solved,the problem of crises became more acute.What is the explanation of this? The economic system of thepresent century differs from its more rudimentary form in anearlier century in this: (i) It has developed amazingly the powerof the machine to produce; (2) it has extended in an extraordinarydegree the mechanisms of credit; (3) it has elaborated equally theinstitutions of organization through the corporation; (4) it hasfostered huge organization of mass control through trade associations,labor unions, cartels; (5) it has seen an intricate spread ofsocial control over many of the processes of the economic system.Whether these forces, while expanding the power to produce,have also contributed to the mechanistic difficulties of the system isa matter to be considered.This condition is common to the whole capitalist economic world.Germany, even before World War I, was fast in the grip of thisdifficulty. But what is the explanation of the psychological reactionof the people of Germany to this condition? Grave as it was, theproblem was not new. The answer must be looked for in anothersocial rather than purely economic phenomenon. The force behindthe great ferment in Germany finds its explanation in what Ortegay Gasset has called the Kevolt of the Masses. This he describes asfollows:Whereas in past times life for the average man meant finding all aroundhim difficulties, dangers, want, limitations of his destiny, dependence, thenew world appears as a sphere of practically limitless possibilities, safe andindependent of anyone. Based on this primary and lasting impression, the83