production and to replace skilled workers with machines. No doubt the American worker needed to acquire the "fearless, critical, candid and disinterested scientific spirit." Since a properly organized society would demand a "huge increase in both production and consumption," industrial workers would have to accept "regimentation not dissimilar to that required by an army." But this discipline would become intolerable unless workers imposed it on themselves. Imposed from above, it would lead either to fatalistic resignation or to mutiny. If industrial production had to be organized on a military model, the choice, for Croly, presented itself as a choice between a citizen army and a standing army of mercenaries.

Croly prefaced this analysis of "industrial self-government" with a complementary analysis of "direct democracy" in the political realm. Here too, he tried to show that "direct government is not retrogressive." The political devices favored by so many progressives—the initiative, referendum, and recall—should not be thought of, he argued, "just as a way of improving representative democracy." The development of modern communications had called into question the old assumption that republican government had to give way to representative government "outside of city or tribal states." Civic participation was now possible on a wider scale, if only Americans could agree to subordinate administrative efficiency to the moral and political education of the citizens themselves. Americans attached too much importance to "specific results, and too little to the permanent moral welfare" of the community as a whole. They did not seem to understand that efficiency imposed from above, in politics as in industry, would result in "popular servility or organized popular resistance."

The radicalism of Croly's position emerges quite clearly in contrast to Walter Weyl's New Democracy (1912), usually considered a more militant statement of the progressive creed. Since Weyl and Croly collaborated as coeditors of the New Republic, they obviously did not regard their posi

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