No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man except by working down through to the inner organic desire in the man as a man, except by waking his selfishness up and by making it a larger, fuller, nobler, weightier selfishness, and turning the full weight of it every minute, every hour, on his daily work.

The best language an employer can find to express this desire at first to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest copartnership.

5.  The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination about other people because he is not allowed any about himself.  The moment he is, and the moment his employer arranges his work so that he sees every minute all day that the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent. better counts. 30 per cent. more on his own main purpose in life, his imagination is touched about himself and he begins to work like a human being.  When a man has been allowed to work awhile as a human being he will begin to be human with a wider range.  Being a partner touches the imagination and wakes the man’s humanness up.  He not only works better, but he loves his family better when he sees he can do something for them.  He serves his town better and his lodge better when he sees he can do something for them.

6.  Being a partner wakes the man’s imagination toward those who work with him, and toward the public and the markets and the goods and the cities where the goods go.  He reads newspapers with a new eye.  He becomes interested in people who buy the goods, and in people who do not.  Why do they not?  He gropes toward a general interest in human nature, and begins to live.

7.  A man who is being paid wages one night in a week, has his imagination touched about his work one night in the week.  He is merely being a wage-earner.  In being a partner he is being paid, and feels his pay coming in, every thirty seconds, in the better way he moves his hands or does not move his hands.  This makes him a man.

8.  And, finally, as he knows he is being paid, and that he always will be paid, what he earns, he stops thinking of the sick, tired side of his work—­the pay he gets out of it, and begins to love the work itself, and begins to be perfect in it for its own sake.  This makes him a gentleman.

9.  Being a partner makes a man actively and keenly reasonable and practical, not only about his own labour, but about the superior value of other people with whom he works.  He wants the best people in the best places.  He begins to have a practical partner’s imagination about the men who are over him, and about their knowing more than he does.  If he is merely paid wages, he is superstitious, and jealous toward those who know more than he does.  If he is paid profits, he is glad that they do, and strikes in and helps.

10.  Another complete range of motives is soon offered to the employee who is a partner.  He feels the joy of being a part of a big, splendid whole, a disinterested delight and pride in others.  He grows young with it, like a boy in school.