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 coördinate 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.
As this situation illustrates a point of great difficulty to which we
have arrived in our development of social ethics, it may be justifiable
to discuss it at some length. Let us recall the facts, not as they have
been investigated and printed, but as they remain in our memories.
A large manufacturing company had provided commodious workshops, and, at
the instigation of its president, had built a model town for the use of
its employees. After a series of years it was deemed necessary, during a
financial depression, to reduce the wages of these employees by giving
each workman less than full-time work "in order to keep the shops open."
This reduction was not accepted by the men, who had become discontented
with the factory management and the town regulations, and a strike
ensued, followed by a complete shut-down of the works. Although these
shops were non-union shops, the strikers were hastily organized and
appealed for help to the American Railway Union, which at that moment
was holding its biennial meeting in Chicago. After some days' discussion
and some futile attempts at arbitration, a sympathetic strike was
declared, which gradually involved railway men in all parts of the
country, and orderly transportation was brought to a complete
standstill. In the excitement which followed, cars were burned and
tracks torn up. The police of Chicago did not cope with the disorder,
and the railway companies, apparently distrusting the Governor of the
State, and in order to protect the United States mails, called upon the
President of the United States for the federal troops, the federal
courts further enjoined all persons against any form of interference
with the property or operation of the railroads, and the situation
gradually assumed the proportions of internecine warfare. During all of
these events the president of the manufacturing company first involved,
steadfastly refused to have the situation submitted to arbitration, and
this attitude naturally provoked much discussion. The discussion was
broadly divided between those who held that the long kindness of the
president of the company had been most ungratefully received, and those
who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the
social consciousness developing among working people. The first defended
the president of the company in his persistent refusal to arbitrate,
maintaining that arbitration was impossible after the matter had been
taken up by other than his own employees, and they declared that a man
must be allowed to run his own business. They considered the firm stand
of the president a service to the manufacturing interests of the entire
country. The others claimed that a large manufacturing concern has
ceased to be a private matter; that not only a number of workmen and
stockholders are concerned in its management, but that the interests of
the public are so involved that the officers of the company are in a
real sense administering a public trust.
This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of an
individual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a mass
of men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moral
rights.
These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has
become organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperation
of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the
individual owning the capital. There is a sharp divergence between the
social form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as the
employees are more highly socialized and dependent. The president of the
company under discussion went further than the usual employer does. He
socialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen were
living. He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town,
without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or
self-government. He honestly believed that he knew better than they what
was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct
his business. As his factory developed and increased, making money each
year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in
the same way.
He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions
of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our
industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise. Under
this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization,
and systematically treated on the individual basis.
Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than
industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial
control to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack of
democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these
matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence.
The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing
the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out
their desires, and without any organization through which to give them
social expression. The president of the company was, moreover, so
confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the
righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the
men. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his
employees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually took
toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no
thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands
for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard
of the men's needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory,
which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It is
possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of
attaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that of
frank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interest
in a common cause. To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the
power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out
a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral
lesson which our times offer.
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.
The man who insists upon consent, who moves with the people, is bound to
consult the "feasible right" as well as the absolute right. He is often
obliged to attain only Mr. Lincoln's "best possible," and then has the
sickening sense of compromise with his best convictions. He has to move
along with those whom he leads toward a goal that neither he nor they
see very clearly till they come to it. He has to discover what people
really want, and then "provide the channels in which the growing moral
force of their lives shall flow." What he does attain, however, is not
the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain-climber
beyond that of the valley multitude but it is sustained and upheld by
the sentiments and aspirations of many others. Progress has been slower
perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral. He has not
taught his contemporaries to climb mountains, but he has persuaded the
villagers to move up a few feet higher; added to this, he has made
secure his progress. A few months after the death of the promoter of
this model town, a court decision made it obligatory upon the company to
divest itself of the management of the town as involving a function
beyond its corporate powers. The parks, flowers, and fountains of this
far-famed industrial centre were dismantled, with scarcely a protest
from the inhabitants themselves.
The man who disassociates his ambition, however disinterested, from the
coöperation of his fellows, always takes this risk of ultimate failure.
He does not take advantage of the great conserver and guarantee of his
own permanent success which associated efforts afford. Genuine
experiments toward higher social conditions must have a more democratic
faith and practice than those which underlie private venture. Public
parks and improvements, intended for the common use, are after all only
safe in the hands of the public itself; and associated effort toward
social progress, although much more awkward and stumbling than that same
effort managed by a capable individual, does yet enlist deeper forces
and evoke higher social capacities.
The successful business man who is also the philanthropist is in more
than the usual danger of getting widely separated from his employees.
The men already have the American veneration for wealth and successful
business capacity, and, added to this, they are dazzled by his good
works. The workmen have the same kindly impulses as he, but while they
organize their charity into mutual benefit associations and distribute
their money in small amounts in relief for the widows and insurance for
the injured, the employer may build model towns, erect college
buildings, which are tangible and enduring, and thereby display his
goodness in concentrated form.
By the very exigencies of business demands, the employer is too often
cut off from the social ethics developing in regard to our larger social
relationships, and from the great moral life springing from our common
experiences. This is sure to happen when he is good "to" people rather
than "with" them, when he allows himself to decide what is best for them
instead of consulting them. He thus misses the rectifying influence of
that fellowship which is so big that it leaves no room for
sensitiveness or gratitude. Without this fellowship we may never know
how great the divergence between ourselves and others may become, nor
how cruel the misunderstandings.
During a recent strike of the employees of a large factory in Ohio, the
president of the company expressed himself as bitterly disappointed by
the results of his many kindnesses, and evidently considered the
employees utterly unappreciative. His state of mind was the result of
the fallacy of ministering to social needs from an individual impulse
and expecting a socialized return of gratitude and loyalty. If the
lunch-room was necessary, it was a necessity in order that the employees
might have better food, and, when they had received the better food, the
legitimate aim of the lunch-room was met. If baths were desirable, and
the fifteen minutes of calisthenic exercise given the women in the
middle of each half day brought a needed rest and change to their
muscles, then the increased cleanliness and the increased bodily
comfort of so many people should of themselves have justified the
experiment.
To demand, as a further result, that there should be no strikes in the
factory, no revolt against the will of the employer because the
employees were filled with loyalty as the result of the kindness, was of
course to take the experiment from an individual basis to a social one.
Large mining companies and manufacturing concerns are constantly
appealing to their stockholders for funds, or for permission to take a
percentage of the profits, in order that the money may be used for
educational and social schemes designed for the benefit of the
employees. The promoters of these schemes use as an argument and as an
appeal, that better relations will be thus established, that strikes
will be prevented, and that in the end the money returned to the
stockholders will be increased. However praiseworthy this appeal may be
in motive, it involves a distinct confusion of issues, and in theory
deserves the failure it so often meets with in practice. In the clash
which follows a strike, the employees are accused of an ingratitude,
when there was no legitimate reason to expect gratitude; and useless
bitterness, which has really a factitious basis, may be developed on
both sides.
Indeed, unless the relation becomes a democratic one, the chances of
misunderstanding are increased, when to the relation of employer and
employees is added the relation of benefactor to beneficiaries, in so
far as there is still another opportunity for acting upon the individual
code of ethics.
There is no doubt that these efforts are to be commended, not only from
the standpoint of their social value but because they have a marked
industrial significance. Failing, as they do, however, to touch the
question of wages and hours, which are almost invariably the points of
trades-union effort, the employers confuse the mind of the public when
they urge the amelioration of conditions and the kindly relation
existing between them and their men as a reason for the discontinuance
of strikes and other trades-union tactics. The men have individually
accepted the kindness of the employers as it was individually offered,
but quite as the latter urges his inability to increase wages unless he
has the coöperation of his competitors, so the men state that they are
bound to the trades-union struggle for an increase in wages because it
can only be undertaken by combinations of labor.
Even the much more democratic effort to divide a proportion of the
profits at the end of the year among the employees, upon the basis of
their wages and efficiency, is also exposed to a weakness, from the fact
that the employing side has the power of determining to whom the benefit
shall accrue.
Both individual acts of self-defence on the part of the wage earner and
individual acts of benevolence on the part of the employer are most
useful as they establish standards to which the average worker and
employer may in time be legally compelled to conform. Progress must
always come through the individual who varies from the type and has
sufficient energy to express this variation. He first holds a higher
conception than that held by the mass of his fellows of what is
righteous under given conditions, and expresses this conviction in
conduct, in many instances formulating a certain scruple which the
others share, but have not yet defined even to themselves. Progress,
however, is not secure until the mass has conformed to this new
righteousness. This is equally true in regard to any advance made in the
standard of living on the part of the trades-unionists or in the
improved conditions of industry on the part of reforming employers. The
mistake lies, not in overpraising the advance thus inaugurated by
individual initiative, but in regarding the achievement as complete in a
social sense when it is still in the realm of individual action. No sane
manufacturer regards his factory as the centre of the industrial system.
He knows very well that the cost of material, wages, and selling prices
are determined by industrial conditions completely beyond his control.
Yet the same man may quite calmly regard himself and his own private
principles as merely self-regarding, and expect results from casual
philanthropy which can only be accomplished through those common rules
of life and labor established by the community for the common good.
Outside of and surrounding these smaller and most significant efforts
are the larger and irresistible movements operating toward combination.
This movement must tend to decide upon social matters from the social
standpoint. Until then it is difficult to keep our minds free from a
confusion of issues. Such a confusion occurs when the gift of a large
sum to the community for a public and philanthropic purpose, throws a
certain glamour over all the earlier acts of a man, and makes it
difficult for the community to see possible wrongs committed against it,
in the accumulation of wealth so beneficently used. It is possible also
that the resolve to be thus generous unconsciously influences the man
himself in his methods of accumulation. He keeps to a certain individual
rectitude, meaning to make an individual restitution by the old paths of
generosity and kindness, whereas if he had in view social restitution on
the newer lines of justice and opportunity, he would throughout his
course doubtless be watchful of his industrial relationships and his
social virtues.
The danger of professionally attaining to the power of the righteous
man, of yielding to the ambition "for doing good" on a large scale,
compared to which the ambition for politics, learning, or wealth, are
vulgar and commonplace, ramifies through our modern life; and those most
easily beset by this temptation are precisely the men best situated to
experiment on the larger social lines, because they so easily dramatize
their acts and lead public opinion. Very often, too, they have in their
hands the preservation and advancement of large vested interests, and
often see clearly and truly that they are better able to administer the
affairs of the community than the community itself: sometimes they see
that if they do not administer them sharply and quickly, as only an
individual can, certain interests of theirs dependent upon the community
will go to ruin.
The model employer first considered, provided a large sum in his will
with which to build and equip a polytechnic school, which will doubtless
be of great public value. This again shows the advantage of individual
management, in the spending as well as in the accumulating of wealth,
but this school will attain its highest good, in so far as it incites
the ambition to provide other schools from public funds. The town of
Zurich possesses a magnificent polytechnic institute, secured by the
vote of the entire people and supported from public taxes. Every man who
voted for it is interested that his child should enjoy its benefits,
and, of course, the voluntary attendance must be larger than in a
school accepted as a gift to the community.
In the educational efforts of model employers, as in other attempts
toward social amelioration, one man with the best of intentions is
trying to do what the entire body of employees should have undertaken to
do for themselves. The result of his efforts will only attain its
highest value as it serves as an incentive to procure other results by
the community as well as for the community.
There are doubtless many things which the public would never demand
unless they were first supplied by individual initiative, both because
the public lacks the imagination, and also the power of formulating
their wants. Thus philanthropic effort supplies kindergartens, until
they become so established in the popular affections that they are
incorporated in the public school system. Churches and missions
establish reading rooms, until at last the public library system dots
the city with branch reading rooms and libraries. For this willingness
to take risks for the sake of an ideal, for those experiments which must
be undertaken with vigor and boldness in order to secure didactic value
in failure as well as in success, society must depend upon the
individual possessed with money, and also distinguished by earnest and
unselfish purpose. Such experiments enable the nation to use the
Referendum method in its public affairs. Each social experiment is thus
tested by a few people, given wide publicity, that it may be observed
and discussed by the bulk of the citizens before the public prudently
makes up its mind whether or not it is wise to incorporate it into the
functions of government. If the decision is in its favor and it is so
incorporated, it can then be carried on with confidence and enthusiasm.
But experience has shown that we can only depend upon successful men for
a certain type of experiment in the line of industrial amelioration and
social advancement. The list of those who found churches, educational
institutions, libraries, and art galleries, is very long, as is again
the list of those contributing to model dwellings, recreation halls, and
athletic fields. At the present moment factory employers are doing much
to promote "industrial betterment" in the way of sanitary surroundings,
opportunities for bathing, lunch rooms provided with cheap and wholesome
food, club rooms, and guild halls. But there is a line of social
experiment involving social righteousness in its most advanced form, in
which the number of employers and the "favored class" are so few that it
is plain society cannot count upon them for continuous and valuable
help. This lack is in the line of factory legislation and that sort of
social advance implied in shorter hours and the regulation of wages; in
short, all that organization and activity that is involved in such a
maintenance and increase of wages as would prevent the lowering of the
standard of life.
A large body of people feel keenly that the present industrial system
is in a state of profound disorder, and that there is no guarantee that
the pursuit of individual ethics will ever right it. They claim that
relief can only come through deliberate corporate effort inspired by
social ideas and guided by the study of economic laws, and that the
present industrial system thwarts our ethical demands, not only for
social righteousness but for social order. Because they believe that
each advance in ethics must be made fast by a corresponding advance in
politics and legal enactment, they insist upon the right of state
regulation and control. While many people representing all classes in a
community would assent to this as to a general proposition, and would
even admit it as a certain moral obligation, legislative enactments
designed to control industrial conditions have largely been secured
through the efforts of a few citizens, mostly those who constantly see
the harsh conditions of labor and who are incited to activity by their
sympathies as well as their convictions.
This may be illustrated by the series of legal enactments regulating the
occupations in which children may be allowed to work, also the laws in
regard to the hours of labor permitted in those occupations, and the
minimum age below which children may not be employed. The first child
labor laws were enacted in England through the efforts of those members
of parliament whose hearts were wrung by the condition of the little
parish apprentices bound out to the early textile manufacturers of the
north; and through the long years required to build up the code of child
labor legislation which England now possesses, knowledge of the
conditions has always preceded effective legislation. The efforts of
that small number in every community who believe in legislative control
have always been reënforced by the efforts of trades-unionists rather
than by the efforts of employers. Partly because the employment of
workingmen in the factories brings them in contact with the children who
tend to lower wages and demoralize their trades, and partly because
workingmen have no money nor time to spend in alleviating philanthropy,
and must perforce seize upon agitation and legal enactment as the only
channel of redress which is open to them.
We may illustrate by imagining a row of people seated in a moving
street-car, into which darts a boy of eight, calling out the details of
the last murder, in the hope of selling an evening newspaper. A
comfortable looking man buys a paper from him with no sense of moral
shock; he may even be a trifle complacent that he has helped along the
little fellow, who is making his way in the world. The philanthropic
lady sitting next to him may perhaps reflect that it is a pity that such
a bright boy is not in school. She may make up her mind in a moment of
compunction to redouble her efforts for various newsboys' schools and
homes, that this poor child may have better teaching, and perhaps a
chance at manual training. She probably is convinced that he alone, by
his unaided efforts, is supporting a widowed mother, and her heart is
moved to do all she can for him. Next to her sits a workingman trained
in trades-union methods. He knows that the boy's natural development is
arrested, and that the abnormal activity of his body and mind uses up
the force which should go into growth; moreover, that this premature use
of his powers has but a momentary and specious value. He is forced to
these conclusions because he has seen many a man, entering the factory
at eighteen and twenty, so worn out by premature work that he was "laid
on the shelf" within ten or fifteen years. He knows very well that he
can do nothing in the way of ameliorating the lot of this particular
boy; that his only possible chance is to agitate for proper child-labor
laws; to regulate, and if possible prohibit, street-vending by children,
in order that the child of the poorest may have his school time secured
to him, and may have at least his short chance for growth.
These three people, sitting in the street car, are all honest and
upright, and recognize a certain duty toward the forlorn children of the
community. The self-made man is encouraging one boy's own efforts; the
philanthropic lady is helping on a few boys; the workingman alone is
obliged to include all the boys of his class. Workingmen, because of
their feebleness in all but numbers, have been forced to appeal to the
state, in order to secure protection for themselves and for their
children. They cannot all rise out of their class, as the occasionally
successful man has done; some of them must be left to do the work in the
factories and mines, and they have no money to spend in philanthropy.
Both public agitation and a social appeal to the conscience of the
community is necessary in order to secure help from the state, and,
curiously enough, child-labor laws once enacted and enforced are a
matter of great pride, and even come to be regarded as a register of the
community's humanity and enlightenment. If the method of public
agitation could find quiet and orderly expression in legislative
enactment, and if labor measures could be submitted to the examination
and judgment of the whole without a sense of division or of warfare, we
should have the ideal development of the democratic state.
But we judge labor organizations as we do other living institutions, not
by their declaration of principles, which we seldom read, but by their
blundering efforts to apply their principles to actual conditions, and
by the oft-time failure of their representatives, when the individual
finds himself too weak to become the organ of corporate action.
The very blunders and lack of organization too often characterizing a
union, in marked contrast to the orderly management of a factory, often
confuse us as to the real issues involved, and we find it hard to trust
uncouth and unruly manifestations of social effort. The situation is
made even more complicated by the fact that those who are formulating a
code of associated action so often break through the established code of
law and order. As society has a right to demand of the reforming
individual that he be sternly held to his personal and domestic claims,
so it has a right to insist that labor organizations shall keep to the
hardly won standards of public law and order; and the community performs
but its plain duty when it registers its protest every time law and
order are subverted, even in the interest of the so-called social
effort. Yet in moments of industrial stress and strain the community is
confronted by a moral perplexity which may arise from the mere fact that
the good of yesterday is opposed to the good of today, and that which
may appear as a choice between virtue and vice is really but a choice
between virtue and virtue. In the disorder and confusion sometimes
incident to growth and progress, the community may be unable to see
anything but the unlovely struggle itself.
The writer recalls a conversation between two workingmen who were
leaving a lecture on "Organic Evolution." The first was much puzzled,
and anxiously inquired of the second "if evolution could mean that one
animal turned into another." The challenged workman stopped in the rear
of the hall, put his foot upon a chair, and expounded what he thought
evolution did mean; and this, so nearly as the conversation can be
recalled, is what he said: "You see a lot of fishes are living in a
stream, which overflows in the spring and strands some of them upon the
bank. The weak ones die up there, but others make a big effort to get
back into the water. They dig their fins into the sand, breathe as much
air as they can with their gills, and have a terrible time. But after a
while their fins turn into legs and their gills into lungs, and they
have become frogs. Of course they are further along than the sleek,
comfortable fishes who sail up and down the stream waving their tails
and despising the poor damaged things thrashing around on the bank.
He--the lecturer--did not say anything about men, but it is easy enough
to think of us poor devils on the dry bank, struggling without enough to
live on, while the comfortable fellows sail along in the water with all
they want and despise us because we thrash about." His listener did not
reply, and was evidently dissatisfied both with the explanation and the
application. Doubtless the illustration was bungling in more than its
setting forth, but the story is suggestive.
At times of social disturbance the law-abiding citizen is naturally so
anxious for peace and order, his sympathies are so justly and inevitably
on the side making for the restoration of law, that it is difficult for
him to see the situation fairly. He becomes insensible to the unselfish
impulse which may prompt a sympathetic strike in behalf of the workers
in a non-union shop, because he allows his mind to dwell exclusively on
the disorder which has become associated with the strike. He is
completely side-tracked by the ugly phases of a great moral movement. It
is always a temptation to assume that the side which has respectability,
authority, and superior intelligence, has therefore righteousness as
well, especially when the same side presents concrete results of
individual effort as over against the less tangible results of
associated effort.
It is as yet most difficult for us to free ourselves from the
individualistic point of view sufficiently to group events in their
social relations and to judge fairly those who are endeavoring to
produce a social result through all the difficulties of associated
action. The philanthropist still finds his path much easier than do
those who are attempting a social morality. In the first place, the
public, anxious to praise what it recognizes as an undoubted moral
effort often attended with real personal sacrifice, joyfully seizes upon
this manifestation and overpraises it, recognizing the philanthropist
as an old friend in the paths of righteousness, whereas the others are
strangers and possibly to be distrusted as aliens. It is easy to confuse
the response to an abnormal number of individual claims with the
response to the social claim. An exaggerated personal morality is often
mistaken for a social morality, and until it attempts to minister to a
social situation its total inadequacy is not discovered. To attempt to
attain a social morality without a basis of democratic experience
results in the loss of the only possible corrective and guide, and ends
in an exaggerated individual morality but not in social morality at all.
We see this from time to time in the care-worn and overworked
philanthropist, who has taxed his individual will beyond the normal
limits and has lost his clew to the situation among a bewildering number
of cases. A man who takes the betterment of humanity for his aim and end
must also take the daily experiences of humanity for the constant
correction of his process. He must not only test and guide his
achievement by human experience, but he must succeed or fail in
proportion as he has incorporated that experience with his own.
Otherwise his own achievements become his stumbling-block, and he comes
to believe in his own goodness as something outside of himself. He makes
an exception of himself, and thinks that he is different from the rank
and file of his fellows. He forgets that it is necessary to know of the
lives of our contemporaries, not only in order to believe in their
integrity, which is after all but the first beginnings of social
morality, but in order to attain to any mental or moral integrity for
ourselves or any such hope for society.