The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American CharacterSpeer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Philosophy
The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character
Speer, Robert E. (Robert Elliott)
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life; Moral education
among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a
corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these
men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour
on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the
nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and
the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for
developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each
one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic
value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss
of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars
a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste.
The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro
is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white
people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted.
We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly
product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but
it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to
throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most
priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be
prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard
this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and
industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance
by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the
Chamber of Commerce of the United States:
“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent
present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It
aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an
exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a
legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are
now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it
from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big
brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds,
another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the
employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director;
and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many
different ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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