I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.
The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive—the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a substitute for it.
The American engineers of business or great executives—the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute.
§ 2. The Engineer At Work.
The crowning glory of a nation is the independence and the spiritedness of its labor.
I rejoice daily that the war has made a man expensive, has made it impossible for men to succeed in business any longer as employers who do not love work, who cannot make other men love their work, and who have nothing in themselves or in their job or the way they make the job catching—who cannot get men to work for them except by offering them more money than they can earn.
The fact that no man is so cheap he can be had by merely being paid money—the fact that no man is so unimportant but he has to be approached as a fellow human being and has to be persuaded—and given something human and real, is the first faint flush of hope for our modern world. It lets in an inkling at last that the industrial world is going to be a civilization.
If men were made of india-rubber, or reinforced concrete, or wood or steel, no one could hope for better or more efficient men to manage big business than the typical big business men of the phase of American industry now coming to an end.