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body knew, or seemed to know, why I was, there and. I was able to look over their blue-prints with them and talk with them at their own machines. A time of good-fellowship and comradeship was the noon-hour, when the deep whistle blew its terrific blast and we all rushed to the long wash-basin together.

One day an acute observer in the plant said to me: "Jealousy is the most terrible thing in the world. As soon as a man begins to show his head above the average he becomes the target of every brick that anybody can throw. Jealousy sets an industrial plant back worse than anything else. I knew a manager here some years ago who because of jealousy forced out of the organization two of the brightest men we ever had. One of them is now getting elsewhere twenty-five thousand a year and the other thirty-five thousand a year. And it is the same in the rank and file. If one man is promoted to be a foreman or gets a raise in wages, a lot of fellows are always ready to say that he got the advancement through a pull or through being servile to some superior."

PETTY TYRANTS

The psychology of the factory foreman is very interesting to me. He is an important link between the management and labor. In days gone by the foreman has frequently shown all the qualities of a petty tyrant, and this more certainly if he rose from the ranks than if he did not. I inquired about the cause, and it seemed to be a universal opinion that few men can stand elevation above their fellows. The sergeant in the army is more of a tyrant than a commissioned officer. A suddenly acquired sense of power seems to be a perilous human possession. Thus the sudden rise from. worker to foreman shakes the human morale of a large

number of men. So clearly is this recognized that in the best-managed modern industries the foreman is now put on his mettle to show that he can deal humanly with his men. In case of prolonged controversy between workers and the foreman, the best-managed modern industry gets rid of its foreman and not of the workers, instead of backing the foreman through thick and thin. The tendency generally is in any event to take away from the foreman the last word about hiring and firing, and invest it in a highly competent employment manager.

"You see, it's about this way," said one worker. "We all like those of our kind. The foreman doesn't realize it, but he is swayed by his likes and dislikes. Until he gets a lot of experience he doesn't give a man a square deal whom he doesn't like."

The foreman is closest to the workers and can do much harm in loss of production and in defective human relations. That is why modern industry has to watch him and cut his head off soon if he cannot iron out misunderstandings and meet the requirements of production. Failing in this he is dangerous. A former foreman, now the assistant superintendent in the plant, said: "At first when I became a foreman I was as arrogant as the devil. And I had to get over it."

Some men get over it and some never do. I was interested to find that most of the men who had risen to superintendencies and assistant superintendencies were rich in human sympathy and in modest human nature.

The shop superintendent could have given advice to the President of the United States on one important matter. He said: "I have grown to understand that the best thing that can happen to me is to pick the strongest men as my

lieutenants. They cannot hurt me. The better they do their work, the better my whole job shows up and the better it is for the business. I learned something once from a notice to heads of departments tacked up on the wall of a railway office in Albany: 'If you haven't got a man qualified to take your place, get one. In case the president of the road should die, all that it will be necessary to hire will be an office boy.""

The coarse, rough humor and bantering of the American skilled mechanic was new to me. It reminded me of a character in "The Virginian" who, when called an opprobrious name, said: "Smile when you say it, or I'll shoot." It is the tone or the twinkle of the worker that gets his rough humor across safely.

Human weakness makes it necessary to lay much stress on safety appliances and compensation laws. The plant pessimist said to me: "We have to put signs on every damn post until I get tired of looking at 'em. See that fellow over there grinding his tool! He knows he ought to have his goggles on, he knows the rules, but he forgets or he just won't do it or he takes a chance. He'll get a piece of metal into his eye, and the community has to foot the bill. Only about ten per cent of these machines really need a guard, but we have to guard all of 'em because of this damn fool human nature."

In the employment office I got a glimpse of the rising cockiness and aggressiveness of the foreign-born worker as distinguished from the American. He has been suddenly catapulted from Old World conditions into a land of plenty beyond his dreams, and the war wages and recent labor need have given him in many cases a touch of ignorant arrogance. The pinch of hard times may alter this temper. The plant pessimist spoke of the harm done during the war by paying large wages to young boys.

"The chances are," said he, "that we have made damned loafers out of those boys seven times out of ten. It takes experience to know how to live. And it isn't safe that the foreign-born should have so much prosperity in America until they learn to use it."

What brought these people here and herded them in race colonies in congested cities? The mills and factories. They are responsible for the unassimilated, undigested human mass. Would it not be wise to slow down on immigration for a generation and give assimilation a chance to catch up, give the foreign-born whom we have with us a chance to become the kind of people we are and to be genuinely and really a part of us?

THE CAUSES OF "SOLDIERING"

I got a new insight into "soldiering" —that is, taking it easy, lying down on the work. There is no doubt, as I think Emerson alleged, that most men are as lazy as they dare to be. Few individuals take to hard work naturally. That was the function of slavery in early

times, to get men in large numbers into the habit of work. One tribe conquered another tribe and put the conquered to toil. The Normans slowly bred in the enserfed Anglo-Saxons of England the habit of work, and that was the final making of the Anglo-Saxons. They came through strong, and pushed the idling Normans out of power, and have themselves been in power all over the I world ever since. But such "soldiering" as there is in American industry is partly also the product of the industrial system. It is partly the fault of poor, unhuman, untactful foremanship-a fine foreman in the plant with me claims that fifty per cent of it is thus caused. That is probably too large. And the war methods of American industry increased "soldiering." A vast amount of production was called for on the cost-plus basis. The drag-net was thrown out for workers in every direction. Many factories were saturated with excess of help. Easy-going ways readily developed when the volume of workers, at any wage to procure them, was greater than the ill-organized volume of work.

One of the chief causes of "soldiering" seems to be the doubt about steady and continuous employment on the part of the worker. The staid economist jeers at the fallacy of the union belief that slowing up of effort will "make work" for a greater number. But the laborer who has been connected with an industry which is cursed with slack times, who has seen a rushing business followed again and again by a period of unemployment, who gets word through underground channels that the raw stock is running low and that the faster he works the sooner he and his comrades will be out on the street again looking perhaps for a long time in vain for a livelihood, who believes the charge that there have been many shut-downs in this country only for the purpose of keeping prices up by causing demand to speed hot-footed after supply, who hears that speculation in materials and not the steady flow of materials often controls output and employment-how can you blame a generation of workers, schooled in this combination of fact and belief, if they "soldier" on their jobs, with the thought that they are keeping employment steadier for a greater number of their kind?

THE NEW FREEDOM

The American worker insists on a rea sonable measure of personal liberty, and the mass of factory workers are still smarting under the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment by a process which they regard as the snap judgment of war conditions. Most of them could get along without beer, but a large majority of them are still resentfully quarreling with the fate which denies them the long-accustomed privilege of taking a drink when and where they please.

The American worker also dislikes being regarded as merely a worker, a member of a lower social class in his country. Above all, he is demanding an opportunity for self-expression and a

square deal. This tendency is the moving force of the great tide of so-called industrial democracy. This means to the worker a great deal more than shop committees and industrial councils. The worker has not been alone in his sense of serfdom. It has been felt by the members of a political organization in the invisible presence of the power of the inner ring; the small merchant who does not dare to think differently from what his banker thinks; the member of the college faculty who kowtows faithfully to the patron trustee.

These men have their prejudices as well as their generosities. They will tell you that the Interchurch World Movement was wrecked because it ran head on against the brotherhood of wealth, which they hold is in eternal conflict with the brotherhood of man. They blame management and capital for evils for which the management and capital. of any plant are only remotely responsible. When the falling off in the demand for automobiles came last summer, chiefly because the bankers of the country would not extend further credit to automobile dealers, and the workers were dropped by the hundred, one worker said to another on the street car:

"Well, I hear you got laid off, too. How long have you worked there?" "Three years," said his comrade. "Well, that shows how much they think of you, too. We don't own our own jobs."

The majority of these men would overturn the Eighteenth Amendment. And yet there are evidences of a better judgment forming. An intelligent foreman. talked to me of the clearer minds of

...

some of his men as soon as they let up on drink.

"They think of things they never thought of before," said he. "A while ago the newspapers had a lot to say about talking with Mars, and one of my men who had quit drinking because he had to, timidly asked me one day if I would explain this Mars business to him. I did as best I could, and he absorbed it like a child. While he was drinking he wouldn't have given a darn about it. There is a big intelligence in these men that has not been tapped. These fellows begin to understand that the saloon was never their real friend. This same man who wanted to talk about Mars came to me around Christmas-time and said:

'What do you think? I can't go to the saloon nights, and so I am buying a Victrola and staying at home with the kids.""

In this plant, where the percentage of discharge for drinking was formerly high, since the abolition of the saloon less than one-tenth of one per cent are discharged for this cause.

CAUSES OF UNREST

One of the blacksmiths, speaking of vacation, said: "I thought last night I was going out of town with my family on a little vacation, too; but I got home and found that the landlord had been around and was going to raise my rent so high that I can't afford to go on a vacation. The politicians have been putting assessments up in the city and the landlord is passing the extra taxes on to me." A workman who had taken off his shoes to rest his feet said:

"You see those shoes? I went home

the night before last and I said to the wife, 'I must have a new pair of shoes.' She said: 'All right; go downtown and get a good pair, because a good pair is cheaper in the end.' And I said: 'I have only six dollars to put into shoes at the most, and I can't get a good pair that I would like short of fifteen dollars.' And the best I could do when I got downtown was this pair at $4.50 in a bargain sale. They are not what I want. They don't fit exactly, and I have to take them off once in a while until I get them worked in. I would not buy such trash if I could help it; but what can I do?"

Worry seems to be the greatest single cause of unrest and inefficiency and lack of production-worry about a man's own health or the health of his family, worry about what will happen to his family if he is disabled or dies, the haunting fear of the loss of his job. The man who solves the problem of the stabilization of employment would just now be one of the greatest benefactors of mankind.

Also the monotony of modern factory specialization contributes greatly to unrest, I believe. The vice-president here was telling me of a worker who came in recently for a job. When they inquired what he had been doing previously, he said: "Me work on nut 45 in Ford." A man performing a simple automatic operation, who has nothing to do but watch his fellows and brood upon his and their unsatisfactory condition, begins to see red after a while about the inadequacy of his wage and the pettiness of his bosses. And the result is apt to be a desire of change for change's sake, for larger and larger wages which may be unfair to the employer and the public, for violence and excitement

anything to relieve the strain of monotony.

The man who solves the problem of monotony of operation in industry would be another exceedingly great benefactor of mankind. It is one of the chief causes of ineffective production and industrial unrest. It is an important factor in a large labor turnover. You cannot get men, especially young men without family ties, to stay long in one place, on one operation, even at a high wage. There is danger of the very high progressive methods of specialization getting rapidly to the point of diminishing returns. As one man expressed it to me, "It's too near slavery!" We have here a problem not only in industry, but of course also in citizenship.

Managers are going at this problem of monotonous specialization through training schools within the plant. There is one here where I am. A great rubber plant in Akron has a large school for apprentices between fifteen and eighteen years of age, where a general high school education is carried on side by side with a technical training in many of the operations of the particular industry. Such an apprentice is not only a better citizen, but he can perform more than

In a later issue Senator Davenport will tell of some other experiences of his as No. 4626 in a factory.

one operation, and change from one to another occasionally is a relief. The broader education of apprentices could be carried on in every large city with good results, as it is being carried on in Dayton by the National Cash Register Corporation, the industrial high schools of the city acting in unison with the plant and with the technical university at Cincinnati.

Our superintendent tells me that every week at the foremen's conference is adopted the plan of giving each man a problem to work out and report on at the next meeting. He says it doesn't make much difference whether the problem is immediately practical or not. It starts the mental activity, develops men, and helps to cut down productive hours and costs. Breadth of interest makes a better specialist. That is the reason, I suppose, that the keenest managers like their technical experts to have a good college education.

There is a fatigue period in machine industry beginning in the morning between ten and eleven and in the afternoon between three and four. It is therefore of the greatest consequence that the lunch hour in a great plant should have careful attention. If the men rush out to junk hash houses and eat hurriedly a coarse and unbalanced ration, and then stand outdoors and bake on the sidewalk in the summer or freeze in the winter, they are not prepared properly for the work of the afternoon. A great lunch floor, well lighted, with a balanced meal, well served, at cost, with opportunity for smoking and perhaps music or movies, is one of the most profitable, as well as one of the most human, of modern industrial developments. Any large factory without it is a back number.

U

NCLE BEN, the villagers all call him, and indeed most of the folk along that pleasant New England countryside are his kin, and proud to acknowledge the relationship. He is a big man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds in weight, and when I first visited the valley fifteen years ago he was proudly seventy-five years young. Though he had done the heaviest farm work all his life, he stood as straight as a soldier, and his white hair and beard and his jovial face with its round rosy cheeks made him resemble very closely a picture-book Santa Claus.

Surely there was nothing in this man's appearance to suggest Adonoram, the well-drawn character in Mary Wilkins Freeman's story "The Revolt of Mother," nor did his home resemble in the least the dreary place in which Lizzie and Sammie had been brought up. The house was comfortable, with a goodsized pantry adjoining the cheery

kitchen, a sunny sitting-room, and a stiff little parlor where an old rosewood piano stood. Aunt Abbie graduated from a select female seminary back in the fifties, and the thin sweet voice of the instrument still tinkled bravely under the touch of her roughened fingers. The bedroom was large and airy, and there were pleasant chambers abovestairs that could accommodate a host of grandchildren at holiday time. And yet

How Adonoram would have gloried in Uncle Ben's farm buildings! They stretched in an irregular line from the back door to the edge of the home meadow: the carriage house, with slatted shelves for seed corn above the ample floor space; the large chicken-house, with row upon row of nests; the icehouse, filled each winter from the nearby river; the milk-house, equipped in the most up-to-date way; the big horse barn, an imposing structure with huge haymows above the stables; and the cow

barn, with comfortable accommodations for twenty-five cows. Two hundred acres of the choicest land in the valley lay about these well-kept buildings, and any man might well be proud of such possessions.

If days instead of years had passed since my first meeting with Uncle Ben and Aunt Abbie, his gentle little wife, my memories of it could not be more vivid. I was spending a summer with a schoolmate at the other end of the valley, and we had driven over to solicit for a Ladies' Aid supper. Aunt Abbie won my heart at once, and when she suggested that I stop and rest while my friend went on to the next house I was only too glad to comply. Presently she invited me upstairs to look at a wonderful old quilt that had been her mother's, and we were soon in the midst of an animated discussion of patchwork designs. Suddenly a thunderous voice bellowed from below, "Mother!" The

little lady sprang to her feet and flew down the stairs as though some one's life depended upon her haste. I followed, expecting some awful calamity. Apparently nothing unusual was going on. As I reached the door the big man remarked, calmly: "Going to town. Where's my pocketbook?" As she handed it to him Aunt Abbie was looking him over carefully. "Wait a minute, father. I must brush your hair, and you need a clean collar. Come in, child, come in." And while I visited with Uncle Ben his wife put on his collar, fastened his tie, tucked a clean handkerchief into his pocket, and smoothed his thick white hair.

During the five years that followed I spent many a happy day with Aunt Abbie. The scene which I had witnessed on my first visit to the house I found to be a daily, almost an hourly, occurrence. Every time Uncle Ben entered the house that commanding cry of "Mother!" rang through the quiet rooms. No matter what Aunt Abbie was doing-cleaning the attic, shaking the furnace, rolling out cookies, or taking a nap-she hurried to his side. I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if just once she had answered with that familiar phrase, "In a minute." The old man's imperious demands were those

of a spoiled child. It was evident that he neither knew nor cared where any of his belongings were "mother" always laid out his clothes and supplied him with clean collars and handkerchiefs. She fastened his shoes and put on his rubbers. She kept his diary and made out his checks. She cooked the food he brought according to his direction, and at the end of the day she read aloud from his agricultural papers while he dozed on the sofa. Just how she managed to keep her home so exquisitely neat, her cookie jar filled, and her grandchildren supplied with knitted socks and mittens was a mystery. She was a wonderful manager.

Adonoram's wife was mistress within her tiny house, with its shabby walls and scant furnishings; but Uncle Ben's wife, in her more comfortable home, was merely valet, secretary, and cook. Her husband bought, not only cows, but household supplies as well, without her knowledge and consent. No great crisis came to bring the thought of revolt to Aunt Abbie's patient soul. For years no word or look betrayed the fact that she realized the slavery of her life. When, flushed with happiness, I went to her to tell of my own coming marriage, however, she said: "Husbands are what we make them, child. Don't you ever

begin the way I did. At the start a man is glad to consider his wife, and don't you let yours know any different. He'll be happier that way, and you'll live to do for him longer."

There came a time when there was dust on the old piano and the cookie jar was often empty. More and more frequently Aunt Abbie was roused from the sofa by her husband's voice, and we noticed that her hands shook when she tried to fasten collar buttons and shoestrings with the old haste. Every one except Uncle Ben knew that the little lady was wearing out. If we who loved her voiced our fears, he was indignant -he was hale and hearty at eighty, and was she not a full ten years younger? A bit tired to-day, that was all. Abbie was tired-tired out-and we could not grieve when she fell asleep one soft spring morning, though we should miss her sadly.

Aunt