This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of an individual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a mass of men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moral rights.

These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has become organized into a vast social operation, not with the cooeperation of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the individual owning the capital.  There is a sharp divergence between the social form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as the employees are more highly socialized and dependent.  The president of the company under discussion went further than the usual employer does.  He socialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen were living.  He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town, without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or self-government.  He honestly believed that he knew better than they what was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct his business.  As his factory developed and increased, making money each year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in the same way.

He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise.  Under this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization, and systematically treated on the individual basis.

Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial control to domestic and social arrangements.  They felt the lack of democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence.  The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out their desires, and without any organization through which to give them social expression.  The president of the company was, moreover, so confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the men.  He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his employees the best surroundings.  As it developed, he gradually took toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard of the men’s needs.  This process slowly darkened his glints of memory, which might have connected his experience with that of his men.  It is possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of attaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that of frank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interest in a common cause.  To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral lesson which our times offer.