Chapter XX: Appendix (3)

The strike requires long practice and great skill to wield
it well. Practice in it is more costly than the experiments
at Woolwich. Mr. Dolles, in his new work on political
economy, gives some statistics which abundantly illustrate
the folly of strikes, although he only gives one side of the
case, namely, the losses which fall directly upon the
laborers themselves. If to these were added the losses of
capitalists, the aggregate would become colossal. In 1829
the Manchester spinners struck, and lost $1,250,000 in wages
before the dispute was at an end. The next year their
brethren at Ashton and Stayleybridge followed their example
in striking and in losing $1,250,000. In 1833 the builders
of Manchester forfeited $360,000 by voluntary idleness. In
1836 the spinners of Preston threw away $286,000. Eighteen
years afterward their successor, seventeen thousand strong,
slowly starved through thirty-six weeks and paid $1,200,000
for the privilege. In 1853 the English iron-workers lost
$12,000 by a strike. Such losses marked, too, the strikes of
the London builders in 1860, and tailors in 1868, and the
northern iron-workers in 1865. The strike of the Belfast
linen-weavers, which was ended a few weeks since by the
mediation of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, cost the operatives $1,000,000.

The cost of strikes is expressible only in the aggregate of
the savings of labor consumed in idleness, of the loss to
the productivity of the country, of the disturbance of the
whole mechanism of exchange, and of the injury wrought upon
the delicate social organization by the strain thus placed
upon it. The famous Pittsburgh strike is estimated to have
cost the country ten millions of dollars. When so costly a
weapon is found to miss far more often than it hits, it is
altogether too dear. * * *

Trades-unions in this country seem to me to be gravely at
fault in clinging to such an obsolete weapon. They should
have turned their attention to our modern improvement upon
this bludgeon.

Arbitration is a far cheaper and more effective instrument
of adjusting differences between capital and labor--a far
more likely means of securing a fair increase of wages. It
places both sides to the controversy in an amicable mood,
and is an appeal to the reason and conscience--not wholly
dead in the most soulless corporation. It costs next to
nothing. It is already becoming a substitute for strikes in
England, where the trades-unions are adopting this new
weapon. * * *

Trades-unions ought, among us, to emulate the wisdom of
European workingmen, and use their mechanism to organize
forms of association which should look not alone to winning
higher wages but to making the most of existing wages, and
ultimately to leading the wage-system into a higher
development. The provident features of the English
trades-unions are commonly overlooked, and yet it is
precisely in these provident features that their main
development has been reached. Mr. George Howell shows that a
number of societies, which he had specially studied, had
spent in thirty years upward of $19,000,000 through their
various relief-funds, and $1,369,455 only on strikes. Mr.
Harrison speaks of seven societies spending in one year
(1879) upward of $4,000,000 upon their members out of work.
He shows that seven of the great societies spent in 1882
less than 2 per cent of their income on strikes; and states
that 99 per cent of union funds in England "have been
expended in the beneficent work of supporting workmen in bad
times, in laying by a store for bad times, and saving the
country from a crisis of destitution and strife."

Trades-unions ought to be doing for our workingmen what
trades-unions have already done in England. * * * It has
been by the power of combination among the workingmen,
developed through the trades-unions, that this long list of
beneficent legislation--factory acts, mines-regulation acts,
education acts, tenant-right acts, employers' liability
acts, acts against "truck," acts against cruelty to animals,
etc.--has been secured. It has been wrested from reluctant
parliaments by the manifestations of strength on the part of
the laboring classes. * * *

Our trades unions ought to be the means of securing one of
the great necessities of labor in this country--accurate and
generally diffused information concerning the state of the
labor-market. Were there any thorough combination in
existence on the part of these unions in hard times, there
could be diffused through the great centers of labor in the
East regular reports of the labor-market in the different
local centers of the country, such as would guide workingmen
in their search for opportunities of work. * * *

Another action that our labor unions might take in the
interest of the workingmen is in the development of
co-operation. The story of European co-operation is one of
the most encouraging tales of our modern industrial world.
Germany, for example, had in 1877 some 2,830 credit
societies; of which 806 reported 431,216 members; advances
for the year, in loans to their members, $375,000,000, with
a loss of one mark to every 416 thalers, or 23-4/5 cents on
every $297--an indication of soundness in their financial
operations that many capitalistic corporations might well
envy. The rapid growth of these societies is bringing the
omnipotence of credit to the aid of the workingmen in
Germany.

We have within the past decade had a most encouraging
growth of a somewhat similar form of co-operation in the
building and loan associations, which are now estimated to
number probably about 8,000 in the nation, with a membership
of 450,000, and an aggregated capital of $75,000,000.

The co-operative stores have reached a wonderful
development in England, with most beneficent results. There
were 765 stores reporting to the congress in 1881, which
showed aggregate sales of $65,703,990, with profits of
$435,000; while Scotland reported 226 stores in the same
year, representing sales of $17,423,170, and profits of
$113,665.

Against this showing our workingmen have comparatively
little to offer. We have, it is true, had a great deal more
of experimenting in co-operative distribution than is
ordinarily supposed. Co-operative stores began among us
between 1830 and 1840. The Workingmen's Protective Union
developed a great many stores at this time, which together
did a business in their best days ranging from $1,000,000 to
$2,000,000 per annum. In the decade 1860-70 there was an
extensive revival of co-operative stores; plans for
wholesale agencies being even discussed. A few of these
earlier stores still live. Two great national orders have
arisen, seeking to build up co-operative stores, among other
aims.

The Grangers had in 1876 twenty State purchasing agencies,
three of which did a business annually of $200,000, and one
of which did an annual business of $1,000,000. They claimed
to have, about the same time, five steamboat or packet
lines, fifty societies for shipping goods, thirty-two grain
elevators, twenty-two warehouses for storing goods. In 1876
one hundred and sixty Grange stores were recorded. In he
same year it was officially stated that "local stores are in
successful operation all over the country."

The Sovereigns of Industry also developed co-operative
distribution largely. In 1877 President Earle reported that
"ninety-four councils, selected from the whole, report a
membership of 7,273, and with an average capital of only
$884 did a business last year of $1,089,372.55. It is safe
to assume that the unreported sales will swell the amount to
at least $3,000,000."

There have been numerous stores started apart from these
orders. The finest success won is by the Philadelphia
Industrial Co-operative Society. Starting in 1875 with one
store, it has now six stores. Its sales for the quarter
ending February 18, 1882, were $51,413.63. A considerable
increase of interest in such stores marks the opening of our
decade. Stores are starting up in various parts of the
country. The Grangers claim to have now hundreds of
co-operative stores, upon the Rochdale plan, in successful
operation. Texas reports officially (1881) seventy-five
co-operative societies connected with this order. * * *

We had an epoch of brilliant enthusiasm over co-operative
agriculture in 1840-50, but little has been left from it.
One form of agricultural co-operation, a lower form, has
been astonishingly successful--the cheese-factories and
creameries. It is estimated that there are now 5,000 of them
in the country. In co-operative manufactures we have had
many experiments, but few successes, from 1849 onward.
Massachusetts reported twenty-five co-operative
manufactories in 1875. All of them, however, were small
societies.

Now, co-operation has its clearly marked limitations. It is
of itself no panacea for all the ills that labor is heir to.
But it can ameliorate some of the worst of those ills. It
can effect great savings for our workingmen, and can secure
them food and other necessaries of the best quality. If
nothing further arises, the spread of co-operation may
simply induce a new form of competition between these big
societies; but no one can study the history of the movement
without becoming persuaded that there is a moral development
carried on which will, in some way as yet not seen to us,
lead up the organization of those societies into some higher
generalization, securing harmony. It is constantly and
rightly said that business can never dispense with that
which makes the secret of capital's success in large
industry and trade, namely, generalship. Co-operation can,
it is admitted, capitalize labor for the small industries,
in which it is capable of making workingmen their own
employers, but it is said it can never, through committees
of management, carry on large industries or trade. I can,
however, see no reason why hereafter it may not enable large
associations to hire superior directing ability at high
salaries, just as paid generals give to republics the
leadership which kings used to supply in monarchies. There
are in the savings-banks of many manufacturing centers in
our country amounts which if capitalized would place the
workingmen of those towns in industrial independence; moneys
which, in some instances, are actually furnishing the
borrowed capital for their own employers. In such towns our
workingmen have saved enough to capitalize their labor, but
for lack of the power of combination, let the advantage of
their own thrift inure to the benefit of men already rich.
They save money and then loan it to rich men to use in
hiring them to work on wages, while the profits go to the
borrowers of labor's savings.

But the chief value of co-operation, in my estimate, is its
educating power. It opens a training school for labor in the
science and art of association.

Labor once effectively united could win its dues, whatever
they may be. The difficulties of such association have lain
in the undeveloped mental and moral condition of the rank
and file of the hosts of labor. * * *

Now, of this effort at co-operation I find scarcely any
trace in the trade organizations of our workingmen.
Trades-unions have until very lately passed the whole
subject by in utter silence. What has been done by
workingmen in this country in the line of co-operation has
been done outside of the great trade associations, which
form the natural instrumentalities for organizing such
combination. They offer the mechanism, the mutual knowledge,
the preliminary training in habits of combination, which
together should form the proper conditions for the
development of co-operation. Is it not a singular thing,
considering the manifold benefits that would come to labor
from such a development, that the attention of these great
and powerful organizations has not heretofore been seriously
called to this matter. * * *

The story of such attempts as have already been made in
this direction is one of a sad and discouraging nature to
all who feel the gravity of this problem. Again and again
great organizations have risen on our soil, seeking to
combine our trade associations and promising the millennium
to labor, only to find within a few years suspicion,
distrust, and jealousy eating the heart out of the order,
and disintegration following rapidly as a natural
consequence. The time must soon come let us hope, when the
lesson of these experiences will have been learned.

These are some of the salient faults of labor--faults which
are patent to all dispassionate observers. The first step to
a better state of things lies through the correction of
these faults. Whatever other factors enter into the problem,
this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if
it would reach the equation of the good time coming. No
reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent,
indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together.
Self-help must precede all other help. Dreamers may picture
utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and
demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's
own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible
workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen
after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face
the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an
honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of
by-ways to dishonest success. Nature is a hard
school-mistress. She allows no makeshifts for the discipline
of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the
strengthful qualities. Her American school for workers is
not as yet overcrowded. The rightful order of society is not
as yet submerged on our shores. There are the rewards of
merit for all who will work and wait. No man of average
intelligence needs to suffer in our country if he has clear
grit in him. "The stone that is fit for the wall," as the
Spanish proverb runs, "will not be left in the road."

II

FAULTS OF CAPITAL

But--for there is a very large "but" in the case--when all
this is said, only the thorough going _doctrinaire_ will
fail to see that merely half the case has been presented.
There is a shallow optimism which, from the heights of
prosperity, throws all the blame of labor's sufferings on
labor's own broad shoulders; steels the heart of society
against it because of these patent faults, and closes the
hand against its help, while it sings the gospel of the
Gradgrinds--"As it was and ever shall be. Amen."

Labor itself is not wholly responsible for its own faults.
These faults spring largely out of the defective social
conditions amid which the workingman finds himself placed.
Before we proceed to administer to him the whole measure of
the "whopping" due for his low estate, we had better look
back of him, to see why it is that he is as he is.

The inefficiency of labor is by no means the fault of the
individual laborer alone. Heredity has bankrupted him
before he started on his career. His parents were probably
as inefficient as he is--and most likely _their_ parents
also. One who sees much of the lower grades of labor ceases
to wonder why children turn out worthless, knowing what the
parents were. General Francis A. Walker, in opening the
Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute at Boston lately,
said:

"There is great virtue in the inherited industrial
aptitudes and instincts of the people. You can no more make
a first-class dyer or a first-class machinist in one
generation than you can in one generation make a Cossack
horseman or a Tartar herdsman. Artisans are born, not made."

Our incompetents may plead that they were not born
competent. It does not readily appear what we are going to
do about this working of heredity against labor, except as
by the slow and gradual improvement of mankind these low
strata of existences are lifted up to a higher plane.
Meanwhile we must blame less harshly and work a little more
earnestly to better the human stock.

The environment of labor handicaps still further this
organic deficiency. In most of our great cities the homes of
the workingmen are shockingly unwholesome; unsunned, badly
drained, overcrowded. The tenements of New York are enough
alone to take the life out of labor. City factories often
are not much better. The quality of the food sold in the
poorer sections of our cities--meat, bread, milk, etc.--is
defectively nutritious, even where it is not positively
harmful. The sanitary conditions are thus against labor.

This could be largely reflected by the State and city
authorities, and ought to be rectified in simple justice to
society at large, which is now so heavily burdened by the
manifold evils bred under such conditions. Government guards
carefully the rights both of land and capital by an immense
amount of legislation and administration. Has not labor a
fair claim to an equal solicitude on the part of the State?
Health is the laborer's source of wealth, but it is by no
means so farefully looked after as are the resources of the
other two factors of production. It is only within the last
three years that in New York we have had a satisfactory
tenement-house law or a fair administration of any law
bearing on this evil. There ought to be the exercise of some
such large wisdom as led the city of Glasgow to spend
$7,000,000 in reconstructing three thousand of the worst
tenements of that city, with a consequent reduction of the
death rate from 54 per thousand to 29 per thousand, and with
a corresponding decrease in pauperism and crime.

To this end our municipal governments should be taken out
of party politics and made the corporation business that
they are in German cities.

We have in none of the States of our Union any such
legislation as that of the thorough system of factory laws
in England, and we ought to supply the lack promptly.
Whatever may be said as to interference on the part of
legislation with the rights of capital, the sufficient
answer is that the whole advance of society has been a
constant interference on the part of legislation with the
merely natural action of the law of supply and demand; and
that only thus has England, for example, secured the immense
amelioration in the condition of the problem of labor and
capital which marks her state to-day.

It can be said also in this connection that if Government
has one business more peculiarly her own than another, it is
to look after the class that most needs looking after; and
that not simply from the interest of the class itself, which
would rarely supply a basis for governmental interference,
but in the interests of society at large--of the State
itself. The State's first concern is to see her citizens
healthful, vigorous, wealth-producing factors; and to this
end bad sanitary conditions, which undermine the
"health-capital" of labor, imperatively demand correction.

The deeper seated the roots of labor's inefficiency in
heredity and environment, the greater the need for an
education that will develop whatever potencies may lie
latent. Inefficiency will rarely correct itself. Superior
ability must train it into better power. Where is there any
proper provision for such an education?

State governments and our National Government have for a
number of years been fostering certain branches of
industrial education, chiefly in the line of agriculture.
The late report of the Bureau of Education upon industrial
education presents a very encouraging summary of what is
thus being done under the guidance of the State. It reports
concerning forty-three colleges aided by State grants to
give agricultural and mechanical training, besides a large
number of technical departments in other colleges,
industrial schools, evening classes for such instruction,
etc. Probably the finest example of industrial education
that the country possesses is found in the Hampton schools
in Virginia. Of attempts, however, to combine general and
intellectual education with practical training and
handicrafts we have few examples. The Hampton schools,
already alluded to, present one of the best. Professor
Adler's school in this city is very interesting in this
respect.

Our common schools have until lately signally passed by the
whole field of practical education. Drawing is at last being
generally introduced, and sewing is also being introduced to
a small extent, I believe, especially in New England. But
the schools which are supposed to be intended for the mass
of the people, and which are supplied at the public cost,
have made next to no provision for the practiced training of
boys and girls to become self-supporting men and
women--wealth-producing citizens; while the whole curriculum
of the school-system tends to a disproportionate
intellectuality, and to an alienation from all manual labor.
* * *

The necessity of the State's entering the educational field
is disputed by no one; but if it is to educate children at
the public cost it is bound, I think, to so educate its
wards that they shall return to society the taxation imposed
for their education. Its justification in becoming
school-master lies in the necessity of making out of the raw
material of life citizens who shall be productive factors in
the national wealth and conservators of its order. If,
therefore, it is justified in teaching the elementary
branches of education, if it is justified in adding to those
elementary branches departments that may be considered in
the nature of luxuries, how much more is it justified in
training the powers by which self-support shall be won and
wealth shall be added to society! * * *

That such efforts to encourage industrial education would
pay our Government is best seen in the example of England.
The International Exhibition of 1851 revealed to England its
complete inferiority to several continental countries in
art-industries, and the cause of that inferiority in the
absence of skilled workmen. The Government at once began to
study the problem, and out of this study arose the
Kensington Museum, with its art-schools, and similar
institutions throughout the country, which have already made
quick and gratifying returns in the improvement of the
national art-industries, and in the vast enrichment of the
trade growing therefrom.

Concerning the uninterestedness of labor and its too common
lack of any identification with capital, we must also look
beyond labor itself to find the full responsibility of this
evil.

The whole condition of industrial labor has changed in our
century. Contrast the state of such labor a century ago with
what it is now. Then the handicraftsman worked in his own
home, surrounded by his family, upon a task all the
processes of which he had mastered, giving him thus a sense
of interest and pride in the work being well and thoroughly
done. Now he leaves his home early and returns to it late,
working during the day in a huge factory with several
hundred other men. The subdivision of labor gives him now
only a bit of the whole process to do, where the work is
still done by hand, whether it be the making of a shoe or a
piano. He cannot be master of a craft, but only master of a
fragment of the craft. He cannot have the pleasure or pride
of the old-time workman, for he _makes_ nothing. He sees no
complete product of his skill growing into finished shape
in his hands. What zest can there be in this bit of manhood?
Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this
fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and
watching the great machine which has been endowed with the
brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to
being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and
plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only
the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of
oiling and cleansing it.

Some few machines require a skill and judgment to guide
them proportioned to their own astonishing capacities, and
for the elect workmen who manage and guide them there is a
new sense of the pleasure of power.

But, for the most part, mechanism takes the life out of
labor as the handicraft becomes the manufacture--or, more
properly, the _machino_-facture; and the problem of to-day
is, how to keep up the interest of labor in its daily task,
from which the zest has been stolen.

Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve
it. Those who profit most by the present factory system
ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who
suffer most from it. They ought to be held morally bound to
make up to them in some way the interest in life that has
gone out with the old handicrafts. They could interest their
hands _out_ of the working hours, and in ways that would
give them a new interest _in_ their working hours. * * *

Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their
eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with
far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will,
according to the eternal laws, return even the good things
of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen
with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and
entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the
formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and
clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and
mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small
cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be
taught a new interest in their task as they learn to
understand its processes and the relation of these processes
to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures,
etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the
leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can
best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science
Association an interesting paper sketched some of these
efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers
use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which
has exhausted its own interest in its task?

Such personal interest on the part of employers in their
employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the
uninterestedness of labor--its lack of identification with
the welfare of capital--its lack of any feeling of loyalty
toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly
expected in our present state of things from the _average_
workingman under the _average_ employer? I emphasize the
"average" because there are employees of exceptional
intelligence and honor, as there are employers of
exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their
men. The received political economy has taught the average
workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those
of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an
inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw,
on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are,
there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as
the workman sees.

Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of
the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875
the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in
over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it
was 20.23. This means that the workingmen's share of the
returns of their own labor, so far from increasing, has
decreased one sixth in five years.

The workingman is disposed to believe in the light of such
figures that the large wealth accumulated by his employer
represents over and above a fair profit the increased wages
out of which he naturally regards himself as being mulcted.
He may be thick-headed, but he can see that in such a
see-saw of profits _versus_ wages the superior power of
capital has the odds all in its favor. He learns to regard
the whole state of the industrial world as one in which
_might_ makes _right_, and feebleness is the synonym of
fault.

How, in the name of all that is reasonable, can the average
man take much interest in his employer or identity himself
with that employer under such a state of things as the
economy sanctioned by the employer has taught him? This is
aggravated by the whole character of our modern industrial
system.

The factory system is a new feudalism, in which a master
rarely deals directly with his hands. Superintendents,
managers, and "bosses" stand between him and them. He does
not know them; they do not know him. The old common feeling
is disappearing. And--this is a significant point that it
behooves workingmen to notice--the intermediaries are
generally workingmen who have risen out of the ranks of
manual labor and have lost all fellow-feeling with their old
comrades, without gaining the larger sympathy with humanity
which often comes from better culture. The hardest men upon
workingmen are ex-workingmen. It is stated, on what seems to
be good authority, that the general superintendent of the
great corporation which lately has shown so hard a feeling
towards its operatives when on a strike was himself only ten
years ago a telegraph-operator.

A further aggravating feature of this problem is the
increasing tendency of capital to associated action. What
little knowledge of his employees or sympathy with them the
individual manufacturer might have is wholly lost in the
case of the corporation. To the stockholders of a great
joint-stock company, many of whom are never on the spot, the
hundreds of laborers employed by the company are simply
"hands"--as to whose possession of hearts or minds or souls
the by-laws rarely take cognizance. Here there is plainly a
case where capital--the party of brains and wealth--the head
of the industrial association, should lead off in a
systematic effort and renew, as far as may be, the old human
tie, for which no substitute has ever been devised.

To conciliate the interests of the classes, and identify
labor with capital, individual employers must re-establish
personal relationships between themselves and their men.
What might be done in this way, and how, this being done,
the present alienation of feeling on the part of our
working-men would largely disappear, must be evident to any
one who has watched some of the beautiful exemplifications
of this relationship which have already grown into being on
our shores. I know of one large manufacturer, in a city not
a hundred miles from this, who started to enter the ministry
as a young man, but found to his intense disappointment that
he had no aptitude for the work of a preacher, and turned
his attention, on the insistent advice of those nearest to
him, to active business. He took up the business which his
father had left him at his death and had left largely
involved. His first task was to pay off, dollar for dollar,
all the debts which his father had bequeathed him, although
in most instances they had been compromised by his
creditors. He then threw the energy of his being into
development of the business, and, in the course of a few
years, put it at the forefront of that line in his native
city. Into his business he breathed the spirit of love to
God and man which had moved him originally to take up the
work of the ministry. He felt himself ordained to be what
Carlyle would have called a "captain of industry." From the
start he established personal, human, living relationships
with his men. He taught them by deed rather than by word to
consider him their friend. He was in the habit of calling in
upon their families in a social and respecting way. In all
their troubles and adversities he trained them to counsel
with him, and gave them the advantage of his riper judgment
and larger vision. In cases of exigency his means were at
their service in the way of loans to tide them over the hard
times. His friends have seen, more than once, coming from
his private office some of the hard-fisted men of toil in
his employ, with tears streaming down their faces. He had
called them into the office on hearing of certain bad habits
into which they had fallen, and so impressive had been his
talk with them, that they left his presence with the most
earnest resolves to do better in the future. The result of
all this relationship has been that during some fifteen
years of the management of this large business he has rarely
changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him
he has never known a strike.

I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading
iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an
appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave
answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a
certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts
of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit
their desire to give in charity in order that they might be
able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all the
_et ceteras_ of a really civilized community in their
work-village. These are examples, in our own country, of
what might be done.

One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern
history is furnished by the town to which reference has
already been made--the town of Mulhouse, where, after some
thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered
into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm
would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on
business as business is ordinarily done here. All the
manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most
of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and
uplifting of the condition of their working people. No one
wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large
hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the
workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father
Peter."

In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital
might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the
pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests. What is
known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this
branch of the problem. The principle is simply that of
giving labor a pecuniary interest in the profits of the
establishment _pro rata_ with his own wages. A _bonus_ is
set on frugality and industry and conscientiousness of work
by making the hands small partners in the concern. * * *

End of Project Gutenberg's Black and White, by Timothy Thomas Fortune