The president of the company desired that his employees should possess the individual and family virtues, but did nothing to cherish in them the social virtues which express themselves in associated effort.

Day after day, during that horrible time of suspense, when the wires constantly reported the same message, “the President of the Company holds that there is nothing to arbitrate,” one was forced to feel that the ideal of one-man rule was being sustained in its baldest form.  A demand from many parts of the country and from many people was being made for social adjustment, against which the commercial training and the individualistic point of view held its own successfully.

The majority of the stockholders, not only of this company but of similar companies, and many other citizens, who had had the same commercial experience, shared and sustained this position.  It was quite impossible for them to catch the other point of view.  They not only felt themselves right from the commercial standpoint, but had gradually accustomed themselves also to the philanthropic standpoint, until they had come to consider their motives beyond reproach.  Habit held them persistent in this view of the case through all changing conditions.

A wise man has said that “the consent of men and your own conscience are two wings given you whereby you may rise to God.”  It is so easy for the good and powerful to think that they can rise by following the dictates of conscience, by pursuing their own ideals, that they are prone to leave those ideals unconnected with the consent of their fellow-men.  The president of the company thought out within his own mind a beautiful town.  He had power with which to build this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it.  The most unambitious reform, recognizing the necessity for this consent, makes for slow but sane and strenuous progress, while the most ambitious of social plans and experiments, ignoring this, is prone to failure.

The man who insists upon consent, who moves with the people, is bound to consult the “feasible right” as well as the absolute right.  He is often obliged to attain only Mr. Lincoln’s “best possible,” and then has the sickening sense of compromise with his best convictions.  He has to move along with those whom he leads toward a goal that neither he nor they see very clearly till they come to it.  He has to discover what people really want, and then “provide the channels in which the growing moral force of their lives shall flow.”  What he does attain, however, is not the result of his individual striving, as a solitary mountain-climber beyond that of the valley multitude but it is sustained and upheld by the sentiments and aspirations of many others.  Progress has been slower perpendicularly, but incomparably greater because lateral.  He has not taught his contemporaries to climb mountains, but he has persuaded the villagers to move up a few feet higher; added to this, he has made secure his progress.  A few months after the death of the promoter of this model town, a court decision made it obligatory upon the company to divest itself of the management of the town as involving a function beyond its corporate powers.  The parks, flowers, and fountains of this far-famed industrial centre were dismantled, with scarcely a protest from the inhabitants themselves.