Social sciences; United States -- Politics and government -- 1901-1909
¶American wage-workers work with their heads as well as their hands.
Moreover, they take a keen pride in what they are doing; so that,
independent of the reward, they wish to turn out a perfect job. This is
the great secret of success in competition with the labor of foreign
countries.
¶¶When all is said and done, the rule of brotherhood remains as the
indispensable prerequisite to success in the kind of national life for
which we strive. Each man must work for himself, and unless he so works
no outside help can avail him; but each man must remember also that he
is indeed his brother’s keeper, and that while no man who refuses to
walk can be carried with advantage to himself or any one else, yet that
each at times stumbles or halts, that each at times needs to have the
helping hand outstretched to him. To be permanently effective, aid must
always take the form of helping a man to help himself; and we can all
best help ourselves by joining together in the work that is of common
interest to all.[7]
¶How to secure fair treatment alike for labor and for capital, how to
hold in check the unscrupulous man, whether employer or employee,
without weakening individual initiative, without hampering and cramping
the industrial development of the country, is a problem fraught with
great difficulties and one which it is of the highest importance to
solve on lines of sanity and far-sighted common-sense as well as of
devotion to the right. Exactly as business men find they must often work
through corporations, and as it is a constant tendency of these
corporations to grow larger, so it is often necessary for laboring men
to work in federations, and these have become important factors of
modern industrial life. Both kinds of federation, capitalistic and
labor, can do much good, and as a necessary corollary they can both do
evil.
¶Opposition to each kind of organization should take the form of
opposition to whatever is bad in the conduct of any given corporation or
union—not of attacks upon corporations as such nor upon unions as such;
for some of the most far-reaching beneficent work for our people has
been accomplished through both corporations and unions. Each must
refrain from arbitrary or tyrannous interference with the rights of
others. Organized capital and organized labor alike should remember that
in the long run the interest of each must be brought into harmony with
the interest of the general public; and the conduct of each must conform
to the fundamental rules of obedience to the law, of individual freedom,
and of justice and fair-dealing toward all. Each should remember that in
addition to power it must strive after the realization of healthy,
lofty, and generous ideals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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