the excellence of the work and the reward it would bring.  Such a correspondence would, of course, be far from exact.  In all petty kinds of business innumerable opportunities would still exist of earning more money either by disregarding the quality of the work or sometimes by actually lowering it.  But at any rate it would be work which would earn money, and not speculation or assiduous repose in an easy chair.

In the same way, just in so far as industry became organized under national control for the public benefit, there would be a much closer correspondence between the quality of the work and the amount of the reward.  In a well-managed corporation a man is promoted because he does good work, and has shown himself capable of assuming larger responsibilities and exercising more power.  His promotion brings with it a larger salary, and the chance of obtaining a larger salary doubtless has much to do with the excellence of the work; but at all events a man is not rewarded for doing bad work or for doing no work at all.  The successful employee of a corporation has not become disinterested in his motives.  Presumably he will not do any more work than will contribute to his personal advancement; and if the standard of achievement in his office is at all relaxed, he will not be kept up to the mark by an exclusive and disinterested devotion to the work itself.  Still, under such conditions a man might well become better than his own motives.  Whenever the work itself was really interesting, he might become absorbed in it by the very momentum of his habitual occupation, and this would be particularly the case provided his work assumed a technical character.  In that case he would have to live up to the standard, not merely of an office, but of a trade, a profession, a craft, an art, or a science; and if those technical standards were properly exacting, he would be kept up to the level of his best work by a motive which had almost become disinterested.  He could not fall below the standard, even though he derived no personal profit from striving to live up to it, because the traditions and the honor of his craft would not let him.

The proposed economic policy of reform, in so far as it were successful, would also tend to stimulate labor to more efficiency, and to diminish its grievances.  The state would be lending assistance to the effort of the workingman to raise his standard of living, and to restrict the demoralizing effect of competition among laborers who cannot afford to make a stand on behalf of their own interest.  It should, consequently, increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average laborer, diminish his “class consciousness” by doing away with his class grievances, and intensify his importance to himself as an individual.  It would in every way help to make the individual workingman more of an individual.  His class interest would be promoted by the nation in so far as such promotion was possible, and could