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Labour being not a commodity, as some material thing merely to be bought and sold, but the human element, is entitled to more than a living wage. It has human aspirations, and desires and needs. It has not only its present but its own and its children's future to safeguard. When it is thus made a partner in the business it becomes more earnest and reliable and effective in its work, less inclined to condone the shiftless, the incompetent, the slacker; more eager and resolute in withstanding the ill-founded, reckless or sinister suggestions or efforts of an ill-advised leadership.

Capital or employer is the gainer also, because it is insured that loyal and more intelligent cooperation in its enterprise that is as essential to its success as is the genius and skill of management.

Taking a different form but proving most valuable alike for management and capital on the one hand, and its workers on the other, is the case of one of our great industrial[Pg 241] plants, the largest of its kind in the world and employing many thousands of workers, where already a trifle over forty per cent. of its stock is in the hands of the workers. Their thrift and their good judgment have enabled them to take advantage of attractive prices and easy methods of payment made them by the company's management. There are already many other concerns where this is true in greater or less proportion.

These are facts that certain types of labour agitators or even leaders as well as special pleaders for labour, find it convenient to forget, or at least not to mention. The same is true also of the millions that are every year being paid out to make all working conditions and surroundings cheerful, healthful, safe; in various forms of insurance, in retiring pensions. Through the initiative of this larger type of employer, or manager of capital, many hundreds of thousands both men and women and in continually increasing numbers, are being thus benefited—outside and above their yearly wage or salary.

A new era in connection with capital and labour has for some time been coming into being; the era of democracy in industry has arrived. The day of the autocratic sway on the part of capital has passed; nor will we as a nation take kindly to the autocratic sway of[Pg 242] labour. It is obtaining a continually fuller recognition; and cooperation leading in many lines to profit-sharing is the new era we are now passing into.

Though there are very large numbers of men of great wealth, employers and heads of industrial enterprises, who have caught the spirit of the new industrial age upon which we have already begun to enter, and who are glad to see labour getting its fairer share of the profits of industry and a larger recognition as partners in industry, there are those who, lacking both imagination and vision, attempt to resist the tide that, already turned, is running in volume. They are our American Bourbons, our American Junkers. They are, considering the ominous undercurrents of change, unrest and discontent that are so apparent in the entire industrial and economic world today, our worst breeders and feeders of Bolshevism and lawlessness.

If they had their way and their numbers were sufficiently large, the flames of Bolshevism and anarchy would be so fed that even in America we would have little hope of escaping a great conflagration. They are the ones who are determined to see that their immense profits are uncurtailled, whose homes must have ten bathrooms each; while great numbers of their workers without whom they would[Pg 243] have to close up the industry—hence their essential partners in the industry though not in name—haven't even a single bath-room and with families as large and in many cases larger.

They are they who must have three or four homes each, aggregating in the millions to build and to maintain. They are they who cannot see why workmen should discuss such things among themselves, or even question them, though in many cases they are scarcely able to make ends meet in the face of continually advancing or even soaring prices, who never enjoy a holiday, and are unable to lay up for the years to come, when they will no longer be "required" in industry. They are they therefore who have but little if any interest or care for even the physical well-being of their workers, say nothing of their mental and spiritual well-being and enjoyments—beyond the fact that they are well enough fed and housed for the next day's work.

They are they who when it is suggested that, recognizing the change and the run of the tide, they be keen-minded enough to anticipate changing conditions and organize their business so that their workers have some joint share in its conditions and conduct, and some share in its profits beyond a mere living wage, reply—"I'll be damned if I do." It doesn't require[Pg 244] much of a prophetic sense now however, to be able to tell them—they'll be damned if they don't.

There is reason to rejoice also that for the welfare of American institutions, the number of this class is continually decreasing. Did they predominate, with the unmistakable undercurrents of unrest, born of a sense of injustice, there would be in time, and in a shorter time than we perhaps realize, but one outcome. Steeped in selfishness, making themselves impervious to all the higher leadings and impulses of the soul—less than men—they are not only enemies of their own better selves, but enemies of the nation itself.

Bolshevism in Russia was born, or rather was able to get its hold, only through the long generations of Czarism and the almost universal state of ignorance in which its people were held, that preceded it. The great preponderance and the continually growing numbers of men with imagination, with a sense of care, mutuality, cooperation, brotherhood, in our various large enterprises is a force that will save this and other nations from a similar experience.

I have great confidence in the Russian people. Its soul is sound; and after the forces of treachery, incompetence and terrorism have spent themselves, and the better elements are able to organize in sufficient force to drive the[Pg 245] beasts from its borders, it will arise and assert itself. There will be builded a new Russia that will be one of the great and commanding nations of the world. In the meantime it affords a most concrete and valuable lesson to us and to all other nations—to strike on the one hand, the forces of treachery and lawlessness the moment they show themselves, and on the other hand, to see that the soil is made fertile for neither their entrance nor growth.

The strong nation is that in which under the leadership of universal free education and equal opportunities, a due watch is maintained to see that the rights of all individuals and all classes are nurtured and carefully guarded. In such a government the nation and its interests is and must be supreme. Then if built upon high ethical and moral standards where mutuality is the watch-word and the governing principle of its life, its motto might through right, power through justice, it becomes a fit and effective member of the Society of Nations.

Internationalism is higher than nationalism, humanity is above the nation. The stronger however the individual nation, the stronger necessarily will be the Society of Nations.

Love, sympathy, fellowship, is not inconsistent with the use of force to restrain malignant evil, in the case of nations as in the case[Pg 246] of individuals. Where goodness is weak it is exploited and becomes a victim of the stronger, when, devoid of a sense of mutuality, it is conscienceless. Strength without conscience, goodness, ungoverned by the law of mutuality, becomes tyranny. In seeking its own ends it violates every law of God and man.