The old- time agitator is no longer useful and a cooler man is needed for collective bargaining. At the same time the employers must put forth a more democratic and a more reasonable type of man if they would bear their side of this new bargaining, so that it has come about quite ( 146) recently that the first attempts have been made in Chicago towards controlling in the interests of business itself this natural tendency of group morality.
It may offer another example of business and commerce, affording us a larger morality than that which the moralists themselves teach. Certain it is that the industrial problems engendered by the industrial revolutions of the last century, and flung upon this century for solution, can never be solved by class warfare nor yet by ignoring their existence in the optimism of ignorance.
America is only beginning to realize, and has not yet formulated, all the implications of the factory system and of the conditions of living which this well- established system imposes upon the workers. As we feel it closing down upon us, moments of restlessness and resentment seize us all. The protest against John Mitchell's statement [ 1 ]that the American workingman has recognized that he is destined to remain a workingman, is a case in point. In their attempt to formulate and correct various industrial ills, trades unions are often blamed for what is inherent in the factory system itself and for those evils which can be cured only through a modification of that system. For instance, factory workers in gen-( 147)-eral have for years exhibited a tendency to regulate the output of each worker to a certain amount which they consider a fair day's work, although to many a worker such a restricted output may prove to be less than a fair day's work. The result is, of course, disastrous to the workers themselves as well as to the factory management, for it doubtless is quite as injurious to a man's nervous system to retard his natural pace as it is to unduly accelerate it. The real trouble, which this "limitation" is an awkward attempt to correct, is involved in the fact that the intricate subdivision of factory work, and the lack of understanding on the part of employees of the finished product, has made an unnatural situation, in which the worker has no normal interest in his work and no direct relation to it. In the various makeshifts on the part of the manufacturer to supply motives which shall take the place of the natural ones so obviously missing, many devices have been resorted to, such as "speeding up" machinery, "setting the pace," and substituting "piece work" for day work. The manufacturers may justly say that they have been driven to these various expedients, not only by the factory conditions, but by the natural laziness of men.
