But assuming that management will accept the teaching of the best employers that the sympathetic handling of labour is an employer’s duty, and, apart from that, is good business, the problem then will be how to make and sustain such an appeal to the worker that he will be induced to co-operate with the management. A similar problem confronted myself during part of the war period when, as Director of Shipyard Labour, I had charge of the labour in some 2,500 firms, employing something like one million men. Output had to be secured and maintained at all costs, so when any trouble occurred my Department had to intervene if the management and men failed to come to a speedy settlement. When forming the Department I gathered together a small band of enthusiastic and far-sighted employers and Trade Unionists, and in conjunction we made a determined and intensive effort to get right down _au fond_ and strike the chords in industrial human nature, on whose vibration co-operation is dependent. Some simple principles were formulated, which, later, as experience grew, were modified in detail. These were made the basis of the appeal, not merely in mass meetings, Trade Union lodges, and elsewhere among the men, but also, with the assistance—and it was loyally given—of the employers, carried into daily workshop practice. At the time when these principles were first put into operation, there were close on 200 strikes a week in the 2,500 firms. After a twelve-months’ regime the strikes which had fallen regularly, month by month, came down to under ten a week. Some employers denied that the principles had anything to do with the diminution of strikes. One of the most prominent described them as “so much pap.” But the Trade Unions took a different view, and I hold many personal letters from some of the principal Unions attributing the whole of the improvement to the sympathetic regime that had been put into operation—it was really nothing more than carrying sympathy and strict justice into all the details of workshop life. Far be it from me to suggest that any State department, without executive responsibility, can run labour as well as a private employer who has that responsibility; the point is that enormous improvement in the co-operative spirit between employers and employed can be effected by the adoption of a well-developed _methodized_ system of handling labour based on sympathetic principles.