Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/613

 PROFIT-SHARING AND COOPERATION. I.

It is a significant fact that most economists who have dealt with this subject have favored profit-sharing and have been skep- tical as to the merits, or at least the possibility, of cooperation ; while, on the other hand, sociologists, or those who have taken a more comprehensive view of social and economic relations, have pronounced in favor of the latter, and have viewed profit- sharing, if with any favor at all, as a temporary palliative of very restricted applicability at best. There are those who have taken a middle ground, believing that cooperation was the ultimate ideal to be reached through an extensive development of profit- sharing. No doubt one class has considered too exclusively the economic difificulties of cooperation, and the other too exclusively its social and moral advantages, whereas neither consideration should be overlooked. It is the economic difficulty of selecting and retaining the requisite managerial ability by a group lacking the necessary intelligence, foresight, and self-control that the one class has emphasized ; it is the social insufficiency of the principle underlying profit-sharing, the economic difficulties of its universal application, and more than all else the obstacle offered by the defective, or at least unsymmetrical, moral char- acter of those upon whom its introduction and continuance depend, that the other class of students has considered.

John Stuart Mill closes his chapter on the "Probable Future of the Laboring Classes" with the following paragraph on this subject: "The value of this 'organization of industry' for heal- ing the widening and embittering feud between the class of laborers and the class of capitalists must, I think, impress itself by degrees on all who habitually reflect on the condition and tendencies of modern society. I cannot conceive how any such person can persuade himself that the majority of the community will forever, or even for much longer, consent to hew wood and

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