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Page 30
The president of this company fostered his employees for many years; he
gave them sanitary houses and beautiful parks; but in their extreme
need, when they were struggling with the most difficult situation which
the times could present to them, he lost his touch and had nothing
wherewith to help them. The employer's conception of goodness for his
men had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift and
temperance. Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities had
also been given for recreation and improvement. But this employer
suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse. A
movement had been going on about him and among his working men, of which
he had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor.
Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in
many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their
watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual
and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were
moved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditions
under which they were laboring.
Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropic
employer had given his town were negative and inadequate. He had
believed strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, but
had failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence and
concerted action. With all his fostering, the president had not attained
to a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined that
virtue for them largely meant absence of vice.
When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak more
fairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employees
appealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quite
sure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not be
deserted by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified and
well-organized union toward the workmen in a "non-union shop," who had
contributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moral
power.
In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for an
instant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imagine
that he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must have
considered the moral ruin about him. He stood throughout for the
individual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen of
his youth; those which had enabled him and so many of his
contemporaries to rise in life, when "rising in life" was urged upon
every promising boy as the goal of his efforts.
Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely nothing. The
morals he had advocated in selecting and training his men did not fail
them in the hour of confusion. They were self-controlled, and they
themselves destroyed no property. They were sober and exhibited no
drunkenness, even although obliged to hold their meetings in the saloon
hall of a neighboring town. They repaid their employer in kind, but he
had given them no rule for the life of association into which they were
plunged.
The president of the company desired that his employees should possess
the individual and family virtues, but did nothing to cherish in them
the social virtues which express themselves in associated effort.
Day after day, during that horrible time of suspense, when the wires
constantly reported the same message, "the President of the Company
holds that there is nothing to arbitrate," one was forced to feel that
the ideal of one-man rule was being sustained in its baldest form. A
demand from many parts of the country and from many people was being
made for social adjustment, against which the commercial training and
the individualistic point of view held its own successfully.
The majority of the stockholders, not only of this company but of
similar companies, and many other citizens, who had had the same
commercial experience, shared and sustained this position. It was quite
impossible for them to catch the other point of view. They not only felt
themselves right from the commercial standpoint, but had gradually
accustomed themselves also to the philanthropic standpoint, until they
had come to consider their motives beyond reproach. Habit held them
persistent in this view of the case through all changing conditions.
A wise man has said that "the consent of men and your own conscience
are two wings given you whereby you may rise to God." It is so easy for
the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the
dictates of conscience, by pursuing their own ideals, that they are
prone to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of their
fellow-men. The president of the company thought out within his own mind
a beautiful town. He had power with which to build this town, but he did
not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it.
The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent,
makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious
of social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is prone to failure.
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