Knowledge that Transforms

When on March 4 of the present year the President appointed Bernard M. Baruch chairman of the War Industries Board and defined his duties, he did not, as certain press reports have implied, create an industrial dictator. His action did clear the way for Mr. Baruch's assumption of the duties of a director of industrial war strategy, of an industrial chief of staff-for the present position of the War Industries Board in the American government is comparable in its relation to national industrial policy to nothing so much as the functions of the general staff of the army in its jurisdiction over military strategy. After a year of war the direction of industrial policy is placed in single hands, and a central planning board is established for dealing not only with the problems of production and purchase but with the whole attitude of the government toward the mobilization of business resources for the prosecution of the war. Leadership has been focused and an administrative channel opened for the inauguration of a studied and inferentially constructive industrial policy. The great advance which this step marks is the definite fixing of responsibility for the administration of such a policy. It is