Page:The humanizing of commerce and industry, the Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered in Adelaide, 9th May, 1919.pdf/17

 spirit of the French Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the freedom of the American Declaration of Independence, and our own Australian Constitution will, under the new conception, be enriched and widened. The human element in commerce and industry must have first consideration, and profit must be placed second. The object of life is happiness—not money.

Let us look back over our pre-war legislation and conditions, and see if they complied with the Gospel of Happiness. In a dim, unseeing way we have tried in the past to legislate to bring about ideal conditions. But we were working on a fundamentally wrong principle. We gave legislative recognition to the belief that the object of life is profit or money. But money is only a means to an end. We have always treated it as the end—not the means. We grasped at the shadow—money—and missed the substance—happiness. In missing the great truth that the object of life is happiness, not money, we unconsciously struck a staggering blow at all our money-making projects. The irony of it is that there is considerable experience to show that any business—private or public—carried out with due regard to the happiness of all concerned, will in the end return more profit than if run as a mere money-making concern.

To-day the great Australian mateship born in the heroism and suffering of war requires us all to recognize that every Australian man, woman, and child has a right to practical participation in the Gospel of Happiness. Why should anyone born in this world be sentenced to unhappiness by reason of the conditions surrounding his or her life? All are born with ah equal right to happy conditions, and the true meaning of all the industrial unrest, so marked of recent years, is that the great mass of people have been trying to give voice to their craving and right to a share of the happiness of the world. But because their demands have been made usually in terms of money, resistance has been offered and strikes have occurred, with loss to the community and hideous suffering to many. It is pitiful to think that even the granting of increased money to wage-earners has left them just as unable as previously to obtain the happiness they sought. The reason for this is that the individual cannot buy -with money the conditions essential to his happiness. What are these conditions?

The first is health. This is the essential basis of all material