Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/57

Rh good things, but to the methods of bestowing these good things. Many thoughtful employers, having been beset by labor difficulties, have concluded to make conditions of work pleasanter, in the hope of banishing dissatisfaction. The plan has been successful in some cases. Sometimes these employers are poor psychologists, inasmuch as they fail to understand why blissful content does not follow on the heels of some gift. The young women asked, perhaps, for higher wages, and were given rest rooms and free lunches. Why, forsooth, should they not be happy? Chiefly for the reason that a sop never satisfied anybody. However, many who have grown to distrust union methods are looking with hopeful eyes to employers' betterment schemes as the final solution of labor difficulties. Capital and labor working together for mutual benefit is undoubtedly the ideal condition. But they must really work together if the most desirable results are to be obtained.

Having before us the main features of trade unionism and welfare work, let us now discuss these two agencies. As was stated before, the final test of the value of an institution is the type of citizen it produces. When we seek to improve an individual, we have in view not only the present comfort of that individual, but his future usefulness to society. We feed a hungry boy, not only to keep him quiet and make him fat, but to make him a man. So in all ameliorative work we must keep ever before us the final purpose of it all. The work in itself is of value only in so far as it helps to make better men and women of those whom we would help.

Our duty is toward society at large, and we can discharge it only by helping to promote good citizenship. Now in order to be the best type of individual one must have ever before him an ideal, and an instiutioninstitution [sic] which would elevate any class in society must present to that class a definite ideal; it must give it something for which it must strive, for I am bound to believe that no individual or group will advance very far without this inspiration. "Without a vision all the people perish." Now if we accept this doctrine of social righteousness based on ideals, let us see how far these two industrial betterment agencies under consideration are in harmony with it.

The trade unions in all their bickerings, and turmoil, and failures, and successes, have never lost sight of their goal of better working and living conditions. The union holds up to its members the ideal of class betterment. They are stimulated to further endeavor by this. We must therefore concede to the trade unions a place in our scheme of industrial regeneration. The principle for which the union stands is sound.

Let us now enquire into the social value of employer's undertakings. Here we come to an entirely different situation. The employer is the active force, the employee the passive agent at the outset, and if this condition changes it is owing to the tact of the employer. Welfare work,