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tration, instead of getting for them their just demands, actually serves as a means of keeping them slaves in an unjust social order.

Certainly peace at any price is not the ideal. The industrial pacifists must realize that a peace resting upon an unjust distribution of profits and power, of inhumane working conditions, cannot be a lasting peace. The various plans for conferences and common decisions within an industry-Shop Committees, Industrial Councils, and the like, seem promising. An opportunity to present their case to one another, to come to a mutual understanding, to participate in policies that make for the common advantage, can obviate much of the friction between employers and wage-earners. Investigation and mediation by outside tribunals may often be useful. But in the present condition of industry, obviously a transition situation, we must hesitate to take from the wageearners the one weapon that they feel they can depend upon to remedy intolerable conditions. Wretched as the strike-weapon is, we have not yet worked out an industrial order in which it is safe to make it illegal.

The hope for the future lies in education-the education of the workers to understand their own needs and duties and to use the ballot as the means of remedying their wrongs; the education of the employing class, that they may understand the laborers' point of view and put into operation industrial methods that will bring about a diffused prosperity and a selfrespecting life for their employees; the education of the general public, that it may understand the rights and wrongs of the intricate industrial problem and put its weight on the side of humanity and justice. Strikes, "direct action," economic pressure—these are war-methods; they must in time give way to the

methods of open discussion and decision by the majority vote. What stands in the way of this is— ignorance, and prejudice, the child of ignorance. A better and longer school-education, a more wideawake and socially useful Church, a non-partisan, or omni-partisan, press, these are to be the means of our salvation. In the meantime we must be content to let labor meet the power of organized business with its own organized power, and hope that through their bargaining and bickering some genuine progress may be made.

It is also to be hoped that the labor-unions will more and more use their organized power not merely to wrest higher wages and humaner working conditions from their employers, but to improve the efficiency of their members and to co-operate with capital in bettering the technique of production. They are at present mainly, and necessarily, fightingorganizations. The gradual satisfaction of their aspirations for labor should transform them ultimately into constructive agencies of great value for the future of American industry.

SUGGESTED READINGS

J. R. Commons, Trade-Unionism and Labor Problems.
F. T. Carlton, History and Problems of Organized Labor;
Organized Labor in American History.

John Mitchell, Organized Labor.

Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace, Chap. V.

C. R. Henderson, The Social Spirit in America, Chap. IX.
H. R. Seager, Introduction to Economics, Chap. XXI.

J. G. Brooks, Labor's Challenge to the Social Order.

G. G. Groat, Introduction to the Study of Organized Labor.
T. S. Adams and H. L. Sumner, Labor Problems, Chapters VI,
VII.

W. H. Hamilton, Current Economic Problems, p. 577, ff.
C. N. Fay, in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 109, p. 758.

J. P. Frey, in International Journal of Ethics, vol. 28, p. 485.

CHAPTER XXII

MORALE

DISPUTES and divergences of viewpoint there will always be in industry, as in every other field of cooperative action. But when these disputes merge into a continuous and deep-seated conflict between labor and capital, we have a state of things obviously destructive of efficiency. The maintenance of American industry and commerce upon a high level of efficiency is in no small degree dependent upon corps d'esprit, team-play, a genuine spirit of co-operation. And that is dependent upon the mental attitude of L the workers-what we have in recent years learned to call morale.

Many observers declare that the morale of American wage-earners has been lowered in recent years, The antagonism between their ideals and the policies of their employers has become more conscious. Workers refuse to exert themselves greatly, they repeat the phrases, "take your time," "go easy," "no hurry"; they take vacations from their jobs when they feel like it, they are less and less docile and dependable. One writer declares that "this growing reluctance of wage-earners to give more than they get is the Achilles-heel of our modern industrial system.” Another writer puts the situation thus: "Let us remember that such habits of industry as we can still count on were established under an earlier order, when the relation between reward and effort appeared

closer, in the skilled trades, and when the unskilled workman, illiterate and oppressed, was more amenable to discipline. We are trading on an inherited capital of industrious habits. This is the road to bankruptcy, unless we can learn to create similar habits that may serve for the future."

Certainly we can never again expect, and should never want, to see laborers meek and spiritless, with overseers cracking the whip over them, like so many "dumb, driven cattle." That is not a thinkable American solution for the problem. The development of morale among the workers must come through the awaking of their interest in their work, through the tapping of new sources of creative energy, and the development of a voluntary code of honor, and tradition of loyal service, like that which exists in an army that believes in its cause and in its leaders. The workman who is industrious and faithful must command the admiration of his fellows instead of their suspicion. The slacker and floater must come to be regarded with contempt. In short, morale must be created by the active attitude of the mass of wageearners themselves, and cannot be imposed upon them from without.

To some extent, this tendency to work slowly and do as little as possible for his wages, this lack of interest in the success of the business for which he is working, is due to the natural laziness and selfishness to which man is prone; in so far it can only be overcome by the diffusion of higher moral or religious standards. But human motives and attitudes are largely formed by environment; and the widespread lack of morale among workers is to a large extent the result of external causes that can be removed. The situation cannot be cured by preaching

the necessity of production, or by scolding at labor. We must put ourselves in the place of the workers and consider what can be done to increase their loyalty and enthusiasm for their work.

One important means to this end, alluded to in an earlier chapter, is the extension of vocational education. Interest arises through an intelligent comprehension of the task one is performing, and a realization of its relation to the related tasks which one's fellows are performing. The skilled worker is far more apt to put his heart into his work than the untrained laborer. And the analyses of industrial processes made in recent years by physiologists and technicians reveal an enormous waste of human labor that could be saved by teaching the humblest manual workers the best way to perform their tasks. For the positions requiring more thought and decision, the necessity of trained intelligence is even more obvious. But as yet a very small per cent of American wage-earners receive any sort of scientific training for their work.

This is strikingly the situation in agriculture. The farmers, except for the "hired men," are not "wageearners." But they are to an increasing extent dependent upon the big industrial and commercial concerns the packing houses, the milk distributors, the middlemen, and brokers; and those who do not own their farms have to pay increasingly high rents. Many of them have felt in recent years that the dice were weighted against them, that the prices which they are forced to pay for seed and feed and fertilizers and equipment, coupled with the price at which they were obliged to sell their produce, left them too little opportunity for an honest living. The result has been, in some quarters, a lowering of morale among

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