ENDS AND MEANS
engaged in manual work. This being so, it is clear that the
units of self-government should be groups of the optimum
size. If they are smaller than the optimum, they will fail
to develop that emotional field which gives to group
activity its characteristic quality, while the available quan-
tity of pooled information and experience will be inadequate.
If they are larger than the optimum, they will tend to split
into sub-groups of the optimum size or, if the constituent
individuals remain together in a crowd, there will be a danger
of their relapsing into the crowd's sub-human stupidity and
emotionality.
The technique of industrial self-government has beenv
discussed with a wealth of concrete examples in a remark-
able book by the French economist, Hyacinthe Dubreuil,
entitled A Chacun sa Chance. Among the writers on indus-
trial organization Dubrefuil occupies a place apart; for he
is almost the only one of them who has himself had experi-
ence of factory conditions as a workman. Accordingly,
what he writes on the subject of industrial organization
carries an authority denied to the utterances of those who
rely on second-hand information as a basis for their theories.
Dubreuil points out that even the largest industries can be
organized so as to consist of a series of self-governing, yet
co-ordinated, groups of, at the outside, thirty members.
Within the industry each one of such groups can act as a
kind of sub-contractor, undertaking to perform so much
of such and such a kind of work for such and such a sum.
The equitable division of this sum among the constituent
members is left to the group itself, as is also the preservation
of discipline, the election of representatives and leaders.
The examples which Dubreuil quotes from the annals of in-
dustrial history and from his own experience as a workman
tend to show that this form of organization is appreciated
by the workers, to whom it gives a measure of inde-
pendence even within the largest manufacturing concern,
74