of Human Progress

BY

HENRY GRADY WEAVER

Published March, 1953

Mainspring: Copyright 1947 by Talbot Books. This revised edition of Mainspring: Copyright 1953 by the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.

Printed in U.S.A.

Permission to reprint Mainspring, in whole or in part, is hereby granted by the publisher and copyright holder.

THE AUTHOR AND THE BOOK

Henry Grady Weaver was born at Eatonton, Georgia, December 24, 1889. He received his B.S. from Georgia Tech in 1911, and held a series of jobs in various phases of the automobile industry until 1921. That was the year he went with General Motors. He soon became head of its Customer Research Staff and was judged of sufficient importance in his field to be the Time magazine “cover man” for its issue of November 14, 1938.

PART I

COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS

Chapter 1

PUZZLING QUESTIONS OF VITAL CONCERN TO 2,155,000,000 INDIVIDUALS

FOR 60 known centuries, this planet that we call Earth has been inhabited by human beings not much different from ourselves. Their desire to live has been just as strong as ours. They have had at least as much physical strength as the average person of today, and among them have been men and women of great intelligence. But down through the ages, most human beings have gone hungry, and many have always starved.

Chapter 2

THE GREAT MULTIPLIER

THROUGH foresight, imagination, and individual initiative, man develops tools and facilities which expand his efforts and enable him to produce things which would not otherwise be possible. This is an outstanding difference between man and animal, just as it is an outstanding difference between civilization and barbarism.

Chapter 3

NETWORKS AND PITFALLS

THE modern world is an intricate network of living human energies linking all persons in co-operative effort and in one common fate. The Turks have bread because the Americans smoke cigarettes. New Yorkers eat pineapple ripened in Hawaii because the Burmese mine tin. We drink coffee at breakfast because Brazilians need our iron, machinery, and wheat. And Japanese babies grow strong and healthy when American women buy silk lingerie.

PART II

THE OLD WORLD VIEWS

Chapter 4

THE PAGAN VIEW

THE pagan has a fatalistic outlook on life. He believes that the individual is helpless; that he is wholly at the mercy of relentless forces outside of himself; that there’s nothing he can do to improve his lot.

The vast majority of people have always been pagans. Most of them are still pagans. The superstition is deep-seated. It had its beginning back in prehistoric times.