When in Washington, during the war, I had a wonderful opportunity of meeting the representatives of both labour and capital. I had some preconceived ideas on the labour question when I went to Washington; but now they are all gone. I am perfectly willing, now, to agree with the wage worker, to agree with the employer, to agree with both or to agree with neither. But this one thing I am sure of, and that is that the present system doesn’t work. The present system is failing in getting men to produce.
By nature man likes to produce. Our boy, as soon as he can toddle out-of-doors, starts instinctively to make a mud pie. When he gets a little older he gets some boards, shingles and nails and builds a hut. Just as soon as he gets a knife, do you have to show him how to use it? He instinctively begins to make a boat or an arrow or perhaps something he has never seen. Why? Because in his soul is a natural desire to produce and an inborn joy in production. But what happens to most of these boys after they grow up?
Our industrial system has resulted in almost stultifying men economically and making most of them economically non-productive. Why? I don’t know. I simply say it happens and the salvation of our industries depends on discovering something which will revive in man that desire to produce and that joy in production which he had instinctively when he was a small boy.
Increased wages will not do it. Shorter hours will not do it. The wage worker must feel right and the employer must feel right. It is all a question of feeling. Feelings rule this world,—not things. The reason that some people are not successful with collective bargaining and profit sharing and all these other plans is because they think that men act according to what they say, or according to what they learn, or according to that in which they agree. Men act according to their feelings, and “good feeling” is synonymous with the spirit of coöperation. One cannot exist without the other and prosperity cannot continue without both. Hence the fourth fundamental of prosperity is Coöperation.
V
Our Real Resources
We have gone daffy over things like steam, electricity, water power, buildings, railroads, and ships and we have forgotten the human soul upon which all of these things depend and from which all of these things originate.
Two captains of industry were standing, one day, on the bridge at Niagara looking at the great falls. One man turned to the other and said: “Behold the greatest source of undeveloped power in America.”
“No. The greatest source of undeveloped power in America is the soul of man,” the other replied.
I was talking with a large manufacturer the other day, and he told me that he was supporting scholarships in four universities to enable young men to study the raw materials which he is using in his plant. I asked him if he was supporting any scholarships to study the human element in his plant, and he said “No.” Yet when asked for definite figures, it appeared that eighty per cent. of every dollar which he spends, goes for labour, and only twenty per cent. goes for materials. He is endowing four scholarships to study the twenty per cent. and is not doing a thing to study the eighty per cent.! Statistics show that the greatest undeveloped resources in America are not our mines or our forests or our streams, but rather the human souls of the men and women who work for us.