Perhaps ours are better—­for us.  Perhaps, too, ours will be better for him when he is like us (if we can give him any reason to want to be).  In the meantime, what is there that can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is and in allowing a sliding scale of motives in people?  Starving people and slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful, i.e., not really quite bright toward others, who impute mean, inaccurate motives to them, can only be patiently expected to have a very small area or even mote of unselfishness at first.  A cross-section of our society to-day represents the entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years.  We need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go down the street.  All history is here this minute.

We wish that Labour had better motives.  We wish to get our workmen to understand us better and believe in us more and work for us harder.

We agree that we must begin with them, if we propose to do this, where they are.

Where are they?

There are certain general observations that might seem to the point.

1.  If a man is a sane and sound man and works hard, he must feel that everything he does, every minute, is definitely connected with the main through-train purpose in his life.

2.  If the main purpose in his life is domestic and consists in having his family live well and giving his children a chance, he must feel and be absolutely sure when he is working better or working worse for his employer that he is working better or worse for himself and for those for whom he lives.

3.  In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness or house patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit.  It is the elementary form of his national or human enthusiasm.  It is the form of disinterestedness that has to be attended to in men first; and the way for society to get the labouring man to be public-spirited, to have the habit of considering the rights of others, is for society to have the habit of considering his rights in his daily work.  An intelligent, live man must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish on, if only in the privacy of his own family.  Unselfishness begins in small circles.  The starving man must be allowed a smaller range of unselfishness than the man who has enough.  It is not uncomplimentary or unworthy in human nature to admit that this is so—­to demand that the human being who is starving must be allowed to be selfish.  If he is not bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous to society.  We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and help him in it.  Virtue is a surplus.

4.  This is the first humble, stuttering speech the competent modern employer who proposes to express himself to his men, and get them to understand him and work with him, is going to make.  He is going to pick out one by one every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly desire to be selfish, and help him in it.  He is going to do something or say something that will make the man see, that will make him believe for life, that the most powerful, the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted man he can find in the world to be his partner in being decently, soundly, and respectfully selfish—­is his employer.