It is for the interest of the employer that his men shall make good earnings and have steady work.  The sliding scale enables the company to meet the market; and sometimes to take orders and keep the works running, which is the main thing for the working-men.  High wages are well enough, but they are not to be compared with steady employment.  The Edgar Thomson Mills are, in my opinion, the ideal works in respect to the relations of capital and labor.  I am told the men in our day, and even to this day (1914) prefer two to three turns, but three turns are sure to come.  Labor’s hours are to be shortened as we progress.  Eight hours will be the rule—­eight for work, eight for sleep, and eight for rest and recreation.

There have been many incidents in my business life proving that labor troubles are not solely founded upon wages.  I believe the best preventive of quarrels to be recognition of, and sincere interest in, the men, satisfying them that you really care for them and that you rejoice in their success.  This I can sincerely say—­that I always enjoyed my conferences with our workmen, which were not always in regard to wages, and that the better I knew the men the more I liked them.  They have usually two virtues to the employer’s one, and they are certainly more generous to each other.

Labor is usually helpless against capital.  The employer, perhaps, decides to shut up the shops; he ceases to make profits for a short time.  There is no change in his habits, food, clothing, pleasures—­no agonizing fear of want.  Contrast this with his workman whose lessening means of subsistence torment him.  He has few comforts, scarcely the necessities for his wife and children in health, and for the sick little ones no proper treatment.  It is not capital we need to guard, but helpless labor.  If I returned to business to-morrow, fear of labor troubles would not enter my mind, but tenderness for poor and sometimes misguided though well-meaning laborers would fill my heart and soften it; and thereby soften theirs.

Upon my return to Pittsburgh in 1892, after the Homestead trouble, I went to the works and met many of the old men who had not been concerned in the riot.  They expressed the opinion that if I had been at home the strike would never have happened.  I told them that the company had offered generous terms and beyond its offer I should not have gone; that before their cable reached me in Scotland, the Governor of the State had appeared on the scene with troops and wished the law vindicated; that the question had then passed out of my partners’ hands.  I added: 

“You were badly advised.  My partners’ offer should have been accepted.  It was very generous.  I don’t know that I would have offered so much.”

To this one of the rollers said to me: 

“Oh, Mr. Carnegie, it wasn’t a question of dollars.  The boys would have let you kick ’em, but they wouldn’t let that other man stroke their hair.”