IT

On the Motives of Industrial Enterprise'

By B. PRESTON CLARK

Vice-President, Plymouth Cordage Works, Boston, Mass.

T is to me a privilege to discuss briefly this subject of prime interest to us all. Because I am entirely sure that however much we might differ in methods, the main purpose of our lives is largely the same. There may be differences between us; there should be no antagonism.

In approaching any such subject, our attitude is apt to be based on certain deep-seated beliefs, which have become part of our life and of our thinking. This is peculiarly true of the subject of this paper. Before we can reach any conclusion we must go, so far as we are able, to the root of the matter. We must be true radicals. For the true radical is, I think, he who tries to go to the root, rather than he who would 'pull up the plant, root and all. So I will try to give my thought on four points.

1. What the nature and the ultimate object of industry is. 2. What the industrial struggle itself really is.

3. What should be one's attitude toward organized labor? 4. Can industry be made democratic and remain efficient? What then is the nature and the object of industry? A generation ago an industrial unit was conceived of largely as a money making machine, and this had been increasingly true for nearly a hundred years, as modern industrial units grew in size, and as their money making capacity was realized.

The great business men of forty years ago believed that we must build immense industrial machines, and they were built. Huge, forceful, and yet necessary, as is every step in the world's progress. But they met with unexpected obstacles in legislation, that crystallization of public opinion, and in the great labor unions. Many of them broke down on the human side. Sometimes the machines grew bigger than the men who ran them, and they smashed. Natural enough, for after all, the size of any industrial

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers The Macmillan Company from The Church and its American Opportunities Copyright 1919 by The Macmillan Company.

unit is apt to be measured by the length of one man's shadow. Many of them survived and grew in power.

Today a new conception has arisen. An industrial unit is conceived of by some of us today, not as a machine, but as an organism, something alive and growing, with a wise understanding, almost an instinct, for the newer industrial knowledge. This conception of an organism is valuable and suggestive, nor does it mean the elimination of that magnificent genius for individual leadership which has made American business what it is.

For what is the law of life in an organism? Take the human body. The head, the hands, the eyes, must recognize each other's value. They bandy no words as to class distinctions; and it is a primary fact of human consciousness that no part of the body, or indeed of any organism, can be damaged without injury to the whole.

I need not make the application to industry, for you will already have made it yourselves. If the industrial unit is in its essence an organism, with mutually interdependent parts, then its ultimate purpose is self-evident. However little in the past this may have been recognized, it is yet true that that purpose is the highest development, physical, mental, moral and spiritual, of every person connected with the organization, through the accomplishment by that organization of its special social function in the most perfect possible way; and also and most important, some fair adjustment of the equities of those within the organization (its management, its workers and its capital) with the equities of the great public which it serves.

Some incredulous spirits may say that this is not an accurate photograph of business today in America, and I frankly allow that we are far from the ideal. We in America are wonderful mechanics; we have learned some of the elements of industrial chemistry, but we are just learning the ABCs of the great social chemistry and the human values, through which some day the imagination and the united good will of all the workers will joyfully contribute to the success of a business. It is true that we have yet far to go. But I also submit that we are not the only human activity which still sees its goal far above it. We partly are and hope wholly to be.

My application to industry may sound novel, but in the thought

itself there is nothing new. It is as old as the world. From the dawn of humanity, to accomplish anything in life, two things have been necessary. There must be the vision. The architect, the sculptor, the statesman, each one of these must have in his heart a picture of the splendid thing he means to create. But that vision will help the world not at all, so long as its exists in his mind alone. It must be made real in the stone, the wood, the marble.

And in industry the vision of men and women, working happily and gladly under right conditions, at something of use to the world, and in which they are themselves interested; such a vision, I say, must be made real through such wise humanity and keen intelligence as will result in the business maintaining itself industrially. Playing the game squarely and playing it hard, they would call it in the West.

The best human accomplishment always has been and always will be, some vision of truth or beauty, transmuted into fact, through hard, sustained effort. Such is my thought of the essence and the purpose of industry, and so conceived it is of fully equal dignity with any art or with any science.

For while the medium of the artist is wood, stone, marble, that of industry, rightly conceived, is human nature itself, with its lights and shadows, its heights and depths, its sunlight, its moonlight and its darkness; and always with capacities for the best which we never fully grasp. The uncommon quality of the common man is a constant miracle.

You may say, and you will say with truth, that industry has been, that it is indeed still, thought to be largely concerned with the making of money. But what is happening is this. Dr. Felix Adler saw and stated his conception of industry, which I have largely used, sooner than most of us, yet all over this country today, wise leaders of industry well know that in order to make money they must regard the human factor, that unknown quantity X on which so many businesses have suffered shipwreck.

The men of the future see that industry and humanity are inseparable in any successful business, and well it is that this is so. It is as a practical business man that I speak, and not as a theorist. Let me say that in my judgment human nature is alike the raw material of industry, its finished product, and the means through which the process takes place.

Now let us turn for a moment to consider what this industrial struggle really is. Many good people never sense what it is all about. It has been of course a battle, and in the past, as the history of trade unionism shows, it has been too much a battle between classes. Hard fought and with varying fortunes, and resulting today in two enormous forces-organized labor and organized capital-striving, with an awful waste of effort, like two gigantic tug of war teams.

Here again we must get a new conception, which comes with our increasing democracy. Class lines are being obliterated everywhere. The robber baron has been put out of business by the ballot, the martyrs are no longer tortured, the slave has fought his way to freedom. Freedom, physical, religious, political, is to be the heritage of the world, though more slowly than many of us would wish.

Today the fighting line of this great struggle for freedom is in industry, in the great workshop of the world, where most men and many women spend a large part of their waking hours. And this struggle, my friends, is increasingly, and because we are gradually becoming truly democratic, not between the classes. It is between the men and women of every class who stand for a broad and human sympathy, for a constructive democracy, and those darker hosts who through ignorance or through malice, would set class against class. The cleavage is vertical, not horizontal; and you will bear me out when I say that each one of us today finds allies, and each one of us finds opponents, in our own class, whatever it happens to be, and in every other class. For no special group in the community has a monopoly of all the good or all the evil. Human nature as a whole can be trusted. It is the small minority, who play the game unfairly, who make the trouble for the rest.

To think clear of class and with real democracy, is in my judgment a prime requisite in approaching any human question, and I wonder whether you find this as difficult to do as I do.

To size up a man as a man, independent of those accidents by which our judgment is so apt to be affected, is far from easy. We habitually group people in our thinking. This is natural and proper, but our error lies in our believing this grouping to be fundamental. Employers. Working people. These are hardly more

than catch words. The only human grouping which is fundamental, the only one to which when we are at our best any of us wish to belong, is that which includes all who walk upon two feet. The ability in our thinking to pass freely over and through the barriers of class is of value, while inability to do so dwarfs and stunts a man's thinking.

The following story so well illustrates the limitation of purely class thinking that I must tell it.

A tailor was standing listening to the thunder of Niagara, in the mist that drifts eternally below the horse-shoe falls, and his only remark was "great place to sponge a coat." This story is not told at the expense of the tailor. It is told to help myself to remember how easy it is one's self to illustrate the Chinese proverb that, "A mouse can drink but his fill from the mightiest river.” That one can only get a pint into a pint pot. Or as Carlyle used to put it, "The eye sees in everything what the eye brings with it the power of seeing." And of the many things that cloud our vision, class thinking is one of the most insidious.

Let us turn now from considering the nature and object of industry and the character of the industrial struggle, to organized labor. I approach this subject with a proper caution.

Two men were hoeing in a field in Florida. field in Florida. To them comes running a small boy, excited and out of breath. Says the boy, "There is a man in the marsh over here drowning, won't you come and help get him out?" The men stop and lean on their hoes. One of the men asks, "How deep is he in?" And the boy gasps back, "Up to his ankles." The men start hoeing again, one saying, “Oh, he will get out all right by himself." But they quickly drop those same hoes, and run swiftly across the field to the marsh after the boy has said, "Yes, but he's in head first.”

It is indeed easy to get into the position of that unfortunate man in approaching the labor question.

I am neither for nor against organized labor. I am not indifferent to it. I do not fear it.

Organized labor exists largely because it has proved a practical expedient by which men could, through collective bargaining, get results in hours, wages and living conditions, which they had been unable to secure as individuals, and which they would, in a more ideal and human world, have secured as individuals. I would not