Creative Impulse in Industry Part 2

Mr. Wolf finds that "while it is possible, under certain conditions, to compel obedience, there is no possible way in which a man can be compelled to do his work willingly and when he does it unwillingly he is far from being efficient. He must have the opportunity to enjoy his work and realize himself in its performance." "In our plant,"

he remarks, "we never made it a practice to determine arbitrarily standard methods for performing an operation, for we believe that the men who are actually doing the work have generally as much to contribute as the foremen and department heads in deciding standard practices; and because we give the workman the chance to have the most to say about the matter, he is willing to conform to the standard, because it really represents a concensus of opinion of the men in his particular group." It is significant in this connection to remember that he does not pay the men by special methods to get the return. "I am not necessarily opposed to piece work or task and bonus methods of payment.... We have been able to obtain splendid results without resorting to a system of immediate money rewards." He thinks it is better to pay the workers liberally so that they "can forget this economic pressure and do good work because of the joy that comes from the consciousness of work well done."

Scientific management like ordinary management as a matter of fact does not want to cultivate initiative in the rank and file of workers; it would like to find more of it; and its eternal expectation is that enough of it will rise out of the oppressive atmosphere of the factory system to supply its limited needs. Scientific management especially wants this, as it must have more foremen and teachers to carry forward its advanced schemes of organization. But every manager will tell you that industry does not produce men with sufficient initiative to fill these positions. Their estimates of the number of men found in industry who have initiative varies from one to five per cent. The rest they believe are born, routine workers. They speak of their limitations as native. Managers do not stop to consider that their judgments are based wholly on the reaction of the ma.s.s of wage workers to the special stimuli which they offer. They say also that high school and college boys show up very little if any better in respect to initiative than the lower school product. The truth is that schools and colleges are more concerned with pa.s.sing on the standards of an older generation to a younger, and the younger that generation is the less it is entrusted with opportunity to make its own first hand inquiries. That is, the lower schools which deal with a generation at its most plastic time, furnish the higher schools with minds inured to the pressure of accepting subject matter without independent inquiry or curiosity.

Factory management like college and school management, instead of depending on the subject matter to interest the workers, instead of opening up to them the factors of interest in industrial enterprise, has adopted incentives for getting the required work done. Enlightened school practice, out of long failure to get the children's initiative by the artificial stimulus of rewards for work done, now depends upon the content of the subject matter and the children's experiments with it, to develop their desire to do the work. The practice of depending on school rewards instead of interest in subject matter is largely responsible for superficial knowledge and lack of ability to think as well as to act. As schools fail to incite the interest of the children they train them to put through this and that task and reward them for it without having added to their power of undertaking tasks on their own account. Indeed, as they fail to give them the chance to do that, they actually decrease whatever power they may have had.

The doing of tasks in factories for the sake of rewards, gives the workers experience in winning rewards. As they are interested only in the reward, they carry away no desire or interest in the work experience. As the method of doing the work is prescribed in every detail and their only requirement, under scientific management, is to follow directions with accuracy, they are trained to do their tasks as the children in school are trained. They are trained in routine, and to do each task as it is given. This is not education, it is training to do tricks. The worker does not take over what can be called experience from one task to another. He forms certain motor habits, called skill. But under the efficient methods of scientific management the acquirement of this skill is robbed even of the educational value that it had under the unscientific method of factory work, which within its limited field, left the worker to discover by trial and error what were the best methods of getting results. Moreover, the standards of workmans.h.i.+p which scientific management sets up are not the worker's own standards; he has had no part in the making of them or in deciding on the comparative merits of the results. He accomplishes the results as he follows directions, not for the sake of the result, not for the sake of good workmans.h.i.+p, but for the reward.

As I have said scientific management has given the subject of incentives the same careful thought that it has given to the study of lost energy. The two important incentives for inducing the response of labor to productive enterprises which scientific management has carried forward in their applications, are wages and promotion.

The general a.s.sumption is that the wage as an incentive has no limitations, except the physical limitation of a human being in response to stimulus. And surely it is true that the chance to "make money" is to-day the most powerful stimulus in use. But thoughtful managers of industrial enterprise tell you, incredible as it may seem, that the worker's objection to applying himself to his task is not invariably overcome by antic.i.p.ation of the wage return; he will slack or be perverse or throw over a job in the face of opportunities to earn as good a wage or a better one than he can get elsewhere. It is well known that workers joint unions in the face of opposition of employers and at the risk of losing permanent positions.

A resourceful manager in one of the most intelligently managed plants in the United States told me that women were less susceptible than men to the wage incentive. He found that many of them are content when their wage covers a sum which represents for them their personal requirements; that they cannot interest them in trying for more. On that account the manager takes up the case of the individual girl to see if her ambition to earn more money cannot be stimulated. They find sometimes that a mother requires her daughter to give in her whole wage at the end of the week and that the girl has no pleasure in the spending of it; they visit the mother and persuade her to let the girl keep a proportion of her wage and point out to the mother that she is limiting the girl's ambition. They also find girls who have entire control over the spending of their wages, who are without ambition to earn over and above a certain sum because that sum will meet their own recognized needs. The case of these girls the management tries to cover by encouraging them to save for vacations and other purposes which they offer by way of suggestion. In both of these instances the management undertakes to create new wants or ways of realizing wants which were not recognized by the workers themselves. The satisfaction of these wants may or may not be in the direction of extending experience and expanding contacts. But that is neither here nor there.

The point is, the manager of the industry has used an incentive for increasing production which has no relation to production itself.

He is forced to do this because he fails to make the process of production a matter of interest to the worker. The processes of production do not of themselves as we know compel the workers'

application or stimulate their desire for productive enterprise.

It is in the nature of the case impossible to increase the wage incentive indefinitely. One large and scientifically managed plant has made remarkable provisions for staving off the time when the dead line is reached. They have taken stock account of the labor power they require, the amount of energy which each worker possesses, for the purpose of evaluation and payment. They have undertaken to cover as separate items each condition which affects a worker's relation to his job. They rate as separate items the worker's proficiency, reliability, continuity in service, indirect charges, increased cost of living, and periods of lay-off; they rate him according to the number of technical processes he is proficient in, whether or not he is engaged on more than one; they rate him if he attends the night school connected with the factory and shows in this way a disposition to learn other operations than, those he already knows. Why, they wonder, does only ten per cent of the force take advantage of the school and what, they are eager to find out, can they do further to secure the men's cooperation. For "cooperation," they say, "in a special way deserves credit, since it is unexpected ... certain well defined acts of cooperation will bring extra reward." Their rewards so carefully calculated did not seem to enlist response as spiritual in its nature as cooperation. It seemed that they had reached "the dead line" where wage stimulus fails to draw its hoped for response.

To get from the workers the highest efficiency the scientifically managed plants pay for a task a stated rate based on piece or time; if the task is performed within the time set and the directions for doing the task as laid out by the management, are followed, the worker receives in addition to the regular rate, a bonus. Mr. H.L. Grant, while working with Mr. Taylor, discovered that there was weakness in the system of paying bonuses, and the weakness was not overcome until he devised a method of paying the workman for the time allowed plus a percentage of that time according to what he did. This method he declares constantly induced further effort and overcame what they discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus. As fair or as superior as this bonus may be in relation to the prevailing rate in the market, managers say that the workers are apt in time to fall below the standard as their work becomes routine, unless the incentive after a time is increased or changed in character. In other words the wage incentive is like a virus injection. The dose is not continuously effective, except as the amount is increased or altered.

A usual method of keeping alive the financial incentive is profit sharing and schemes for partic.i.p.ation in profits, but they are rewards of general merit and bids for continuity of service; they have no direct relation to the workers' efficiency and compliance with standards which distinguish the wage rewards of scientifically managed plants.

Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive, is of a.s.sistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the worker is reached. Nothing better ill.u.s.trates the limitations of promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of service. That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker. In the factory where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that promotion is a negligible factor. Where the turnover is high there is greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number of what they call "functionalized foremen" and teachers in proportion to the working force.

It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their direction has produced.

Before scientific management was discovered, business management and machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content. All that was left for scientific management to gather together for its direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own experimental efforts at how best to handle tools. Their efforts it is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort inspired by an interest in the work.

When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage: educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them.

They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it. The responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the opportunity is provided.

Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet little opposition. They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature of welfare work would allay opposition. But I am not inclined to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific management; they have little light to throw on what educational significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific management has introduced in industry. The playgrounds attached to factories, the indoor provisions for social activity, the clubs, while not having an acknowledged relation to the scientific management of the factory and while repudiated by some managers, are a common feature of plants which claim to be scientifically managed. There are scientifically managed plants which object to the recreational and other features which have to do with matters outside the province of the factory, on the ground that it is a meddling with the personal side of people's lives. "A baseball game connected with the factory,"

said the educational manager of a certain plant, "has the effect of limiting the workers' contacts; it is much better for them, as it is for every one, not to narrow their relations.h.i.+ps to a small group, but to play ball with the people of the town." It is significant that this concern deals with the union and conforms to its regulations. Whether this more generous concept of the workers' lives yields more in manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I know, has not discovered.

The very nature of the welfare schemes suggests that they are inspired more out of fear of the workers' freedom of contact than launched on account of comparative findings which relate strictly to the economy of labor power. The policy of leaving the workers free, it was clear in the instance just cited, had been adopted out of a personal preference for freedom in relations.h.i.+ps. The introduction of clinics, rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary provisions, and all arrangements relating directly to the workers' health have a bearing on efficiency and productivity which is well recognized and probably universally endorsed by efficiency managers, even if they are not invariably adopted.

Scientific management wants two things; more men in the labor market to fill the positions of functionalized foremen, more men than modern industrial society has produced; and it wants an army of workers who will follow directions, follow them as one of the managers said, as soldiers follow them. It wants this army to be endowed as well with the impulse to produce. It may by its methods realize one of its wants, that is, an army of workers to follow directions; but as it succeeds in this, as it is successful in robbing industry of its content, and as it reduces processes to routine, it will limit its chances to find foremen who have initiative and it will fail to get from workers the impulse to produce goods.

During the last four years, under the stress of a consuming war every stimulus employed by business management for speeding up production has been advanced. Organized efficiency in the handling of materials has increased the output, as increased rewards to capital and labor have stimulated effort. But the quant.i.tative demand of consumption requirements is insatiable. It is not humanly possible under the present industrial arrangements to satisfy the world's demand for goods, either in time of war or peace. It was never more apparent than it is now, that an increase in a wage rate is a temporary expedient and that wage rewards are not efficient media for securing sustained interest in productive enterprise. It is becoming obvious that the wage system has not the qualifications for the coordination of industrial life. As the needs of the nations under the pressure of war have brought out the inefficiencies of the economic inst.i.tution, it has become sufficiently clear to those responsible for the conduct of the war and to large sections of the civil population, that wealth exploitation and wealth creation are not synonymous; that the production of wealth must rest on other motives than the desire of individuals to get as much and give as little as particular situations will stand.

In England and in the United States, where the individualistic conception of the industrial life has been an inherent part of our national philosophy, the governments, with cautious reservations, have a.s.sumed responsibilities which had been carried in normal times by business. Because business administration had been dependent for its existence on a scheme of profiteering it is not in the position where it can appeal to labor to contribute its productive power in the spirit of patriotic abandon. But governments as they have taken over certain industrial responsibilities are in a better position to make such appeals to capital as well as to labor.

The calculable effect of the appeal to capital to a.s.sume the responsibility is in the long run of pa.s.sing importance, as under the present business arrangement that is the position capital occupies. In other words, the appeal will mark no change in capitalist psychology as it promises to do in the case of labor.

The calculable effect on labor psychology may have revolutionary significance. It is quite another sort of appeal in its effect from the stereotyped and familiar one of employers to labor to _feel_ their responsibility. That appeal never reached the consciousness of working men for the reason that it is impossible to feel responsible or to be responsible where there is no chance of bearing the responsibility.

Experiencing responsibility in industry means nothing more nor less than sharing in the decisions, the determination of procedure, as well as suffering from the failure of those decisions and partic.i.p.ating in their successful eventuation. As the governments in the present case have made their appeals to labor they have carried the suggestion of partners.h.i.+p in responsibility because the government is presumably the people's voice and its needs also presumably are the common needs and not the special interests of individuals. It is hardly necessary to point out that it was not the intention of government officials who made the appeal to excite a literal interpretation; they did not expect to be taken so seriously and up to date they have not been taken more seriously than they intended by American labor. All they mean and what they expect to gain, is what employers have meant and wanted; that is labor's surrender of its a.s.sumed right to strike on the job, its surrender of its organized time standards and its principle of collective bargaining. But when officials speak in the name of a government what they mean is unimportant; what it means to the people to have them speak, and the people's interpretation of what they say, is the important matter.

These appeals of the governments in this time of war to the working people have the tendency to clear the environment of the suggestion that common labor, that is the wage earning cla.s.s (as distinguished from salaried people, employers and the profiteers pure and simple) are incompetent to play a responsible part in the work of wealth production. A responsible part does not mean merely doing well a detached and technical job; it means facing the risks and sharing in the experimental experience of productive enterprise as it serves the promotion of creative life and the needs of an expanding civilization.

As the appeals of the governments at this time bear the stamp of a nation's will, its valuation and respect for common labor, there is the chance, it seems, that they may carry to the workers the energizing thought that _all_ the members of the industrial group must a.s.sume, actually a.s.sume, responsibility for production, if production is to advance. Equally important in the interest of creative work is the power of these appeals to s.h.i.+ft the motive for production from the acquisitive to the creative impulse. In the midst of the world's emergency, driven by the fear of destruction the nations have turned instinctively to the _unused_ creative force in human and common labor, that is to the ability of the wage earner to think and plan. If the response of labor is genuine, if with generous abandon it releases its full productive energy, it is quite certain as matters now stand that neither the governments nor the financiers are prepared to accept the consequence.

If labor in answer to these appeals gains the confidence that it is competent to carry industrial responsibility, or rather that common labor, together with the trained technicians in mechanics and industrial organization are competent _as a producing group_ to carry the responsibility, one need we may be sure will be eliminated which, has been an irritating and an unproductive element in industrial life; I mean the need the workers have had for the cultivation of cla.s.s isolation. As the workers become in the estimation of a community and in their own estimation, responsible members of a society, their more rather than less abortive effort to develop cla.s.s feeling in America, will disappear. Under those conditions concerted cla.s.s action will be confined to the employers of labor and the profiteers, who will be placed in the position of proving their value and their place in the business of wealth creation. On this I believe we may count, that labor will drop its defensive program for a constructive one, as it comes to appreciate its own creative potentiality.

Judging from recent events in England, where the government appeals to labor have had longer time to take effect, it seems that new brain tracks in labor psychology have actually been created. English labor apparently is beginning to take the impa.s.sioned appeals of its government seriously and is making ready to a.s.sume the responsibility for production. The resolutions adopted by the Labor Party at its Nottingham Conference in November in 1917 covered organized labor's usual defense program relating to wage conditions. The Manifesto which was issued was first of all a political doc.u.ment, written and compiled for campaign purposes. But the significance of the party's action is the new interpretation which it is beginning to give industrial democracy. It is evident where state owners.h.i.+p is contemplated that the old idea that industry would pa.s.s under the administrative direction of government officials, is replaced by the growing intention and desire of labor to a.s.sume responsibility for administration whether industry is publicly or privately owned. The Party stands for the "widest possible partic.i.p.ation both economic and political ... in industry as well as in government." In explanation of the Manifesto, the leader of the Party is quoted in the Manchester Guardian as saying, that when labor now speaks of industrial democracy it no longer means what it did before the war; it does not mean political administration of economic affairs; it means primarily industrial self-government.

Perhaps an even better evidence of the intention of English labor in this direction is the movement towards decentralization in the trade union organization. This movement, known as the "shop-stewards"

movement is essentially an effort of the men in the workshops to a.s.sume responsibility in industrial reconstruction after the war, a responsibility which they have heretofore under all circ.u.mstances delegated to representatives not connected directly with the work in the shops. As these representatives were isolated from actual problems of workshop production and alien therefore to the problems in their technical and specific application, they were incapable of functioning efficiently as agents of productive enterprise. This "shop stewards"

movement recognizes and provides for the interdependence of industrial interests, but at the same time it concerns itself with the competent handling of specific matters.

Such organization as the movement in England seems to be evolving, the syndicalists have contended for as they opposed the German idea of state socialism. But the syndicalists in their propaganda did not _develop_ the idea of industry as an adventure in creative enterprise.

Instead they emphasized, as did the political socialists and the trade unionists, the importance of protecting the workers' share in the possession of wealth. They made the world understand that business administration of industry exploited labor, but they did not bring out that both capital and labor, so far as it was possible for each to do, exploited wealth. That was not the vision of industry which they carried from their shops to their meetings or indeed to their homes.

Their failure at exploitation was too obvious.

An interesting ill.u.s.tration of what would happen in the ranks of the syndicalists if the business idea of labor's intellectual and emotional incapacity for functioning, gave way before a community's confidence in the capacity of labor--we have in the case of the migratory workers in the harvesting of our western crops. The harvesters who follow the crops with the seasons from the southern to the northern borders of the United States and into Canada are members of the most uncompromisingly militant organization of syndicalists, The Industrial Workers of the World. On an average it takes ten years for these harvesters to become skilled workers and these men, members of this condemned organization, are the most highly skilled harvesters in the country. On account of their revolutionary doctrines and their combined determination to reap rewards as well as crops, they are considered and treated like outlaws, and outlaws of the established order they are in spirit. When the owners of the farms of North Dakota realized that their own returns on the harvests were diverted in the marketing of their grain, they combined for protection against the grain exchanges and the elevator trusts. While developing their movement they discovered that the natural alliance for their organization to make was with the men who were involved with them in the production of grain. And as the farmers have accepted the harvesters as partners they have formed in effect a coordinated producing combination. Without finally settling the problem of agriculture, they have strengthened the production group and eliminated strife at the most vital point.

In the period of reconstruction the industrial issues of significance to democracy will be whether or not management of industry as it has been a.s.sumed by the state for the purpose of war shall revert after the war to the condition of incompetency which the war emergency disclosed or whether state management shall be extended and developed as it was in Germany after the Franco-Prussian War. Fortunately, these evidences of a new interest of labor in industry as a social inst.i.tution, give us some reason to hope that we shall not be confined to a choice between business incompetency and state socialism. The evidence of the desire on the part of the labor force to partic.i.p.ate in the development of production is the factor we should keep in mind in any plans for democratic industrial reconstruction. It is inevitable that an effort to open up and cultivate this desire of labor will be regarded by the present governing forces with apprehension. The movement of labor in this direction is now looked upon with suspicion even by people who are not in a position of control. The general run of people in fact outside of those who recognize labor as a fundamental force in industrial reconstruction, conceive of the labor people as an irresponsible ma.s.s of men and view their movements as expressions of an irresponsible desire to seize responsibility. They are the men who are not experienced in business affairs and therefore cannot, it is believed, be trusted. The arguments against trusting them are the same old arguments advanced for many centuries against inroads on the established order of over-lords.h.i.+p. But over-lords.h.i.+p has flourished at all times, and in the present scheme of industry it flourishes as it always has, in proportion to the reluctance of the people to partic.i.p.ate as responsible factors in matters of common concern. Corruption and exploitation of governments and of industry are dependent upon the broadest possible partic.i.p.ation of a whole people in the experience and responsibilities of their common life. It is for this reason that we need to foster and develop the opportunity as well as the desire for responsibility among the common people.

After the war, it is to be hoped that America will undertake to realize through its schemes for reconstruction its present _ideals_ of self-government. As it does this, we shall discover that the issues which are of significance to democracy are of significance to education; for democracy and education are processes concerned with, the people's ability to solve their problems through their experience in solving them. If America is ever to realize its concept of political democracy, it can accept neither the autocratic method of business management nor the bureaucratic schemes of state socialism.

It cannot realize political democracy until it realizes in a large measure the democratic administration of industry.

CHAPTER III

ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE GERMAN WAY

Statemans.h.i.+p in Germany covered "industrial strategy" as well as political. Its labor protection and regulations were in line with its imperial policy of domination. Within recent years labor protection from the point of view of statesmans.h.i.+p has been urged in England and America. The waste of life is a matter of unconcern in the United States so long as private business can replenish its labor without seriously depleting the oversupply. It becomes a matter of concern only when there are no workers waiting for employment. The German state has regulated the conditions of labor and conserved human energy because its purpose has been not the short-lived one of private business, but the long-lived one of imperial compet.i.tion. It was the policy of the Prussian state to conserve human energy for the strength and the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was good for the Empire was good, it was a.s.sumed, for the people. The humanitarians in the United States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country accepted this nave philosophy of the German people, which had been so skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy, however, that workers and capitalists understand their own interests and are more capable than the state of looking after them, stood in the way of adopting on grounds of statesmans.h.i.+p the German methods.

The American working man has never been convinced that he can get odds of material advantage from the state. His method is to get all he can through "pull," good luck or his superior wits. He could find no satisfaction like his German brothers in surrendering concrete interests for some abstract idea of a state. He could find no greater pleasure in being exploited by the state than he now finds in exploitation by private business. The average American values life for what he can get out of it, or for what he can put into it. He has no sentimental value of service, nor is service anywhere with us an inst.i.tutionalized ideal. We judge it on its merits, detached perhaps, but still for what it actually renders in values.

In conformity with American ideals, wage earners look to their own movements and not to the state for protection. Their movements require infinite sacrifice, but they supply them with an interest and an opportunity for initiative which their job lacks. The most important antidote for the workers to factory and business methods is not shorter hours or well calculated rest periods or even change-off from one kind of routine work to another. As important as these may be, reform in labor hours does not compensate the worker for his exclusion from the directing end of the enterprise of which he is a part and from a position where he can understand the purpose of his work The trade union interference with the business of wealth production is in part an attempt to establish a coordination of the worker which is destroyed in the prosecution of business and factory organization. The interference of the union is an attempt to bridge the gulf between the routine of service and the administration, and direction of the service which the worker gives.

I do not intend to imply that the labor movement is a conscious attempt at such coordination. It is not. The conscious purpose is the direct and simple desire to resist specific acts of domination and to increase labor's economic returns. But any one who follows the sacrifices which organized workers make for some small and equivocal gain or who watches them in their periods of greatest activity, knows that the labor movement gets its stimulus, its high pitch of interest, not from its struggle for higher wage rates, but from the worker's partic.i.p.ation in the administration of affairs connected with life in the shop. The real tragedy in a lost strike is not the failure to gain the wage demand; It is the return of the defeated strikers to work, as men unequipped with the administrative power--as men without will.

There could be no greater contrast of methods of two movements purporting to be the same, than the labor movement in Germany and in the United States. The German workers depended on their political representatives almost wholly to gain their economic rewards. Their organizations made their appeal to the sort of a state which Bismarck set up. They would realize democracy, happiness, they believed, when their state represented labor and enacted statutes in its behalf.

If Germany loses the war the chances are that the people may recognize what it means for the people of a nation to let the t.i.tle to their lives rest with the state; they will know perhaps whether for the protection they have been given and for the regulation of their affairs and destiny they have paid more than the workers of other countries, who, less protected by law, suffered the exigencies of their a.s.sumed independence.

How much the German people depended upon the state and how much their destiny is affected by it is ill.u.s.trated better by their educational system and its relation to industry than by any labor legislative protective practices or policy.

George Kerschensteiner, the director of the Munich schools, in his book on "The Idea of the Industrial School," tells us that the _Purposes

As a first requisite of efficiency, Germany cla.s.sifies its people, gives them a place in the scheme of things, and holds them there.