None of the three plans is ethically satisfying, and a fourth arrangement should be contemplated. Its characteristics are the following:
1. The idea of service to be pre-eminent instead of the gain, the wage or salary to be apportioned as the means of sustaining the worker in the best possible performance of the service.
2. The work done by the workers to be the means of developing them mentally, æsthetically and volitionally, the educational features therefore to be pre-eminent.
3. The industrial group to be transformed into a social sub-organism (in the ethical sense a sub-organ of the larger organism of the nation). By this is meant that the employers cease to be employers and become functionaries, while each worker in his place and in his degree likewise becomes a functionary. A common social service group will thus be formed embracing the chiefs and the humbler workers. The chiefs will be the executive and administrative functionaries, and will be safeguarded in the due discharge of their proper functions. The workers will not attempt to wrest from their chiefs as they do at present the directive functions which properly belong to the latter (subject, however, to due control). To each of the lesser functionaries in turn will be assigned a sphere within which a relative independence would be his.
The industry as a whole will be an organ of the corpus sociale, and this its character will be expressed in its government. The workers, not required to render implicit obedience to rules imposed upon them by masters and superintendents, will have a voice in the legislation of the industry, in framing the policy of the industry, in electing the chiefs, and in this way the development of the will, upon which I lay the greatest stress, will be attained. The will of the worker, at present fettered, will be liberated by the opportunity given it to become enlightened and effectual.
I am not here describing a scheme which is to be immediately launched in its completeness. I am illustrating the ethical principle as I see it as applied to this particular vocation. I am endeavoring to show how an occupation can be changed into a vocation. The constitutional government of industries would be an intermediate stage between the present autocratic form, in which more or less absolute power is vested in the employer, and that organic constitution of industry which is ethically desirable.
Thus far the following plans have been before the minds of social reformers:
A. Competition, or life and death struggle.
B. Modified competition, or raising the plane of competition, as it is called, that is, doing away with the more ferocious and unscrupulous methods of competition.
C. Socialism.