14 TWENTY-FIRST REPORT. 



Many of the fundamental concepts of American democracy may be traced 

 back to the pioneers of the days of Jackson and William Henry Harrison ; and 

 Americans are quite inclined to believe that industry until recent years has 

 ever taken the form of the small-scale business of the i^eriod from 1800-1850. 

 We are disappointed if the workers of today do not display the same interest 

 in their work as did the pioneer farmer or the small-shop craftsman when 

 working for himself. The employer and the man-on-the-corner today exi)ect 

 the carefully directed worker, deprived of all opportunity for initiative, self- 

 assertion or responsibility, doing a certain simple task over and over again, to 

 exhibit the interest and zeal which is traditionally ascribed to the pioneer 

 American. The common mode of procedure has been vigorously to denounce 

 the worker of today, especially if he be a member of a labor organization. 

 Few have stopped to inquire: — Why are conditions as they are? What steps 

 will insure betterment? 



But, with certain exceptions such as are presented by the gildsmen of 

 Western Europe and by the American pioneers who virtually employed them- 

 selves, history discloses that from the early days when the captives in battle 

 were forced to till the soil for the benefit of their conquerors, through the 

 long hopeless ages of slavery and serfdom, to the modern wage system with its 

 definite contractual payment of money wages, the great mass of the world's 

 workers have been dragged unwillingly into productive activity. Compulsion 

 — the fear of the lash, of discharge, of hunger and of the lack of comforts — 

 has been the potent, but negative, force which has throughout, the ages 

 hastened the steps of the lagging worker. This negative incentive has not and 

 cannot make for efficiency, for joyful and creative work. Coercion will not 

 produce good work ; it is first necessary "to produce desire in the heart of the 

 workman to do good work." "Man's place in industry is not to be mastered 

 but to provide free and willing service." 



Even today according to critics of the present industrial situation, "the 

 whole industrial arrangement is carried on without the force of productive 

 intention ; it is carried forward against a disinclination to produce" ; and a 

 disinclination to produce will inevitably breed unreliability and inefficiency. 

 Consequently, the present industrial arrangement in common with the earlier 

 forms known as slavery and serfdom, must be inefficient from the standpoint 

 of output, and also deadening and debilitating in its effect upon the individual 

 workers. In this connection it may also be pointed out that the growth of 

 the corporate form of business and the tendency to interiwse "layers of corpo- 

 rate securities" between the owners and the property actually owned, tends 

 to destroy the "pride of ownership" and the "joy of workmanship" which the 

 owner so often exhibited in the days when smaller-scale and more simple 

 industrial enterprises were the rule. The typical owner of corporate securi- 

 ties is an investor or a speculator rather than a person interested in the 



