If foodstuffs become too plentiful to be consumed as food, why not find other uses for them? Why use corn only for hogs and distilleries? Why sit down and bemoan the terrible disaster that has befallen the corn market? Is there no use for corn besides the making of pork or the making of whisky? Surely there must be. There should be so many uses for corn that only the important uses could ever be fully served; there ought always be enough channels open to permit corn to be used without waste.
Once upon a time the farmers burned corn as fuel—corn was plentiful and coal was scarce. That was a crude way to dispose of corn, but it contained the germ of an idea. There is fuel in corn; oil and fuel alcohol are obtainable from corn, and it is high time that someone was opening up this new use so that the stored-up corn crops may be moved. Why have only one string to our bow? Why not two? If one breaks, there is the other. If the hog business slackens, why should not the farmer turn his corn into tractor fuel?
We need more diversity all round. The four-track system everywhere would not be a bad idea. We have a single-track money system. It is a mighty fine system for those who own it. It is a perfect system for the interest-collecting, credit-controlling financiers who literally own the commodity called Money and who literally own the machinery by which money is made and used. Let them keep their system if they like it. But the people are finding out that it is a poor system for what we call "hard times" because it ties up the line and stops traffic. If there are special protections for the interests, there ought also to be special protections for the plain people. Diversity of outlet, of use, and of financial enablement, are the strongest defenses we can have against economic emergencies.
It is likewise with Labour. There surely ought to be flying squadrons of young men who would be available for emergency conditions in harvest field, mine, shop, or railroad. If the fires of a hundred industries threaten to go out for lack of coal, and one million men are menaced by unemployment, it would seem both good business and good humanity for a sufficient number of men to volunteer for the mines and the railroads. There is always something to be done in this world, and only ourselves to do it. The whole world may be idle, and in the factory sense there may be "nothing to do." There may be nothing to do in this place or that, but there is always something to do. It is this fact which should urge us to such an organization of ourselves that this "something to be done" may get done, and unemployment reduced to a minimum.
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Every advance begins in a small way and with the individual. The mass can be no better than the sum of the individuals. Advancement begins within the man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from apprenticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere dilettante at labour to a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and without prodding—why, then the world advances! The advance is not easy. We live in flabby times when men are being taught that everything ought to be easy. Work that amounts to anything will never be easy. And the higher you go in the scale of responsibility, the harder becomes the job. Ease has its place, of course. Every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. The man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings. These are his by right. But no one deserves ease until after his work is done. It will never be possible to put upholstered ease into work. Some work is needlessly hard. It can be lightened by proper management. Every device ought to be employed to leave a man free to do a man's work. Flesh and blood should not be made to bear burdens that steel can bear. But even when the best is done, work still remains work, and any man who puts himself into his job will feel that it is work.
And there cannot be much picking and choosing. The appointed task may be less than was expected. A man's real work is not always what he would have chosen to do. A man's real work is what he is chosen to do. Just now there are more menial jobs than there will be in the future; and as long as there are menial jobs, someone will have to do them; but there is no reason why a man should be penalized because his job is menial. There is one thing that can be said about menial jobs that cannot be said about a great many so-called more responsible jobs, and that is, they are useful and they are respectable and they are honest.
The time has come when drudgery must be taken out of labour. It is not work that men object to, but the element of drudgery. We must drive out drudgery wherever we find it. We shall never be wholly civilized until we remove the treadmill from the daily job. Invention is doing this in some degree now. We have succeeded to a very great extent in relieving men of the heavier and more onerous jobs that used to sap their strength, but even when lightening the heavier labour we have not yet succeeded in removing monotony. That is another field that beckons us—the abolition of monotony, and in trying to accomplish that we shall doubtless discover other changes that will have to be made in our system.
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The opportunity to work is now greater than ever it was. The opportunity to advance is greater. It is true that the young man who enters industry to-day enters a very different system from that in which the young man of twenty-five years ago began his career. The system has been tightened up; there is less play or friction in it; fewer matters are left to the haphazard will of the individual; the modern worker finds himself part of an organization which apparently leaves him little initiative. Yet, with all this, it is not true that "men are mere machines." It is not true that opportunity has been lost in organization. If the young man will liberate himself from these ideas and regard the system as it is, he will find that what he thought was a barrier is really an aid.