For every woman to allow herself to be governed from the outside in the most intimate concerns and the deepest and most natural choices of her life is not so very much more absurd than for a man in his business, the main and most important and fundamental activity in which he lives, the one that he spends eight hours a day on, to be controlled from a distance and from outside.
The whole idea, whether applied to biology or industry is a half dead, mechanical idea and only people who are tired or half alive, are long going to be willing to put up with it.
As the mutual education of marriage is an individual affair,—as the more individualness, the more personalness there is in the relation is what the relation itself is for, the mutual education of employers and employees is going to be found to have more meaning, value and power, the more individual and personal—that is to say, the more alive it is.
All live men with any gusto or headway in them, or passion for work, all employers and employees with any headway or passion for getting together in them are as impatient of having the way they get together their personal relations in business governed from outside, as they would be in the sexual relation and for the same reasons.
If it was proposed to have an audience of all the women in America get together in a vast hall and an audience of all the men in America get together in another, and pass resolutions of affection at each other, rules and bylaws for love-strikes and boycotts, and love-lockouts, how many men and women that one would care to speak to or care to have for a father or mother, would go?
Only anæmic men and women in this vast vague whoofy way would either make or accept national arrangements made in this labor-union way for the conditions of their lives together.
And in twenty years only anæmic employers and anæmic employees and workmen are going to let themselves be cooped up in what they do together, by conventions, by national committees, are going to have eight hours a day of their lives grabbed out of their hands by collective bargaining and by having what everybody does and just how much he does of it determined for him as if everybody was like everybody, as if locality, personality and spirit in men did not count, as if the actual daily contacts of the men themselves were not the only rational basis of determining and of making effective what was right.
XIV
THE NEW COMPANY