The president of this company fostered his employees for many years; he gave them sanitary houses and beautiful parks; but in their extreme need, when they were struggling with the most difficult situation which the times could present to them, he lost his touch and had nothing wherewith to help them.  The employer’s conception of goodness for his men had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift and temperance.  Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities had also been given for recreation and improvement.  But this employer suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse.  A movement had been going on about him and among his working men, of which he had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor.

Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in many languages, that “the injury of one is the concern of all.”  Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were moved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditions under which they were laboring.

Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropic employer had given his town were negative and inadequate.  He had believed strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, but had failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence and concerted action.  With all his fostering, the president had not attained to a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined that virtue for them largely meant absence of vice.

When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak more fairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employees appealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quite sure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not be deserted by it.  This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified and well-organized union toward the workmen in a “non-union shop,” who had contributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moral power.

In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for an instant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imagine that he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must have considered the moral ruin about him.  He stood throughout for the individual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen of his youth; those which had enabled him and so many of his contemporaries to rise in life, when “rising in life” was urged upon every promising boy as the goal of his efforts.

Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely nothing.  The morals he had advocated in selecting and training his men did not fail them in the hour of confusion.  They were self-controlled, and they themselves destroyed no property.  They were sober and exhibited no drunkenness, even although obliged to hold their meetings in the saloon hall of a neighboring town.  They repaid their employer in kind, but he had given them no rule for the life of association into which they were plunged.