THE SOCIAL UNREST PERSONAL AND INTRODUCTORY THE nature of a good deal of the evidence in this volume is such as to require an explanation that is more personal than I could wish. This evidence. may, perhaps, be less sharply criticised if a frank statement about it is made. I began, as do most students of social and economic questions, with a too exclusive study of books. It was several years before I learned that for one branch of economic and social study, the "live questions," like strikes, trade unions, the influence of machinery, etc., very few books existed that had more than slight value. Their treatment of the subject was too general. Much of the literature is scarcely in print, before it is out of date because of the extraordinary mobiйty and change of our commercial order. The reaction of this swiftly changing mechanism upon our entire life gives us a series of problems but partially expressed in books and differing in important ways from anything that Europe offers. For instance, we are always perplexed by the question, why distributive coöperation should be so successful in England but so dreary a failure here. There are many reasons, but the main one is found in the conditions that have been brought about by |