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Page 28
It is comparatively easy for an employer to manage her household
industry with a cook, a laundress, a waitress. The difficulties really
begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be
employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the
difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall
altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or,
worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of
utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the
living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly
insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. Such a woman, rather than
the prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no high
standard of quality is established.
The problem of domestic service, which has long been discussed in the
United States and England, is now coming to prominence in France. As a
well-known economist has recently pointed out, the large defection in
the ranks of domestics is there regarded as a sign of revolt against an
"unconscious slavery," while English and American writers appeal to the
statistics which point to the absorption of an enormous number of the
class from which servants were formerly recruited into factory
employments, and urge, as the natural solution, that more of the
products used in households be manufactured in factories, and that
personal service, at least for healthy adults, be eliminated altogether.
Both of these lines of discussion certainly indicate that domestic
service is yielding to the influence of a democratic movement, and is
emerging from the narrower code of family ethics into the larger code
governing social relations. It still remains to express the ethical
advance through changed economic conditions by which the actual needs of
the family may be supplied not only more effectively but more in line
with associated effort. To fail to apprehend the tendency of one's age,
and to fail to adapt the conditions of an industry to it, is to leave
that industry ill-adjusted and belated on the economic side, and out of
line ethically.
CHAPTER V
INDUSTRIAL AMELIORATION
There is no doubt that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to
action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we
have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to
fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement. We have all
been at times entertained by the futile efforts of half a dozen highly
individualized people gathered together as a committee. Their aimless
attempts to find a common method of action have recalled the wavering
motion of a baby's arm before he has learned to co�rdinate his muscles.
If, as is many times stated, we are passing from an age of individualism
to one of association, there is no doubt that for decisive and
effective action the individual still has the best of it. He will secure
efficient results while committees are still deliberating upon the best
method of making a beginning. And yet, if the need of the times demand
associated effort, it may easily be true that the action which appears
ineffective, and yet is carried out upon the more highly developed line
of associated effort, may represent a finer social quality and have a
greater social value than the more effective individual action. It is
possible that an individual may be successful, largely because he
conserves all his powers for individual achievement and does not put any
of his energy into the training which will give him the ability to act
with others. The individual acts promptly, and we are dazzled by his
success while only dimly conscious of the inadequacy of his code.
Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in industrial relations,
as existing between the owner of a large factory and his employees.
A growing conflict may be detected between the democratic ideal, which
urges the workmen to demand representation in the administration of
industry, and the accepted position, that the man who owns the capital
and takes the risks has the exclusive right of management. It is in
reality a clash between individual or aristocratic management, and
corporate or democratic management. A large and highly developed factory
presents a sharp contrast between its socialized form and
individualistic ends.
It is possible to illustrate this difference by a series of events which
occurred in Chicago during the summer of 1894. These events epitomized
and exaggerated, but at the same time challenged, the code of ethics
which regulates much of our daily conduct, and clearly showed that
so-called social relations are often resting upon the will of an
individual, and are in reality regulated by a code of individual
ethics.
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