Between twelve o’clock at night and eight the next morning he must wash and clean his car.  Thus his hours of sleep were abridged.  He was obliged to keep an eye on the passengers to see that they put their fares in the box, to be always, responsible for them, that they got on and off without accident, to watch that the rules were enforced, and that collisions and common street dangers were avoided.  This mental and physical strain for sixteen consecutive hours, with scant sleep, so demoralized him that he was obliged once in two or three months to hire a substitute and go away to sleep.  This is treating a human being with less consideration than the horses receive.  He is powerless against the great corporation; if he complains, his place is instantly filled; the public does not care.

Now what I want to say about this case, and that of the woman who makes a shirt for six cents (and these are only types of disregard of human souls and bodies that we are all familiar with), is that if society remains indifferent it must expect that organizations will attempt to right them, and the like wrongs, by ways violent and destructive of the innocent and guilty alike.  It is human nature, it is the lesson of history, that real wrongs, unredressed, grow into preposterous demands.  Men are much like nature in action; a little disturbance of atmospheric equilibrium becomes a cyclone, a slight break in the levee ’a crevasse with immense destructive power.

In considering the growth of discontent, and of a natural disregard of duties between employers and employed, it is to be noted that while wages in nearly all trades are high, the service rendered deteriorates, less conscience is put into the work, less care to give a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages, and that pride in good work is vanishing.  This may be in the nature of retaliation for the indifference to humanity taught by a certain school of political economists, but it is, nevertheless, one of the most alarming features of these times.  How to cultivate the sympathy of the employers with the employed as men, and how to interest the employed in their work beyond the mere wages they receive, is the double problem.

As the intention of this paper was not to suggest remedies, but only to review some of the causes of discontent, I will only say, as to this double problem, that I see no remedy so long as the popular notion prevails that the greatest good of life is to make money rapidly, and while it is denied that all men who contribute to prosperity ought to share equitably in it.  The employed must recognize the necessity of an accumulated fund of capital, and on the other hand the employer must be as anxious to have about him a contented, prosperous community, as to heap up money beyond any reasonable use for it.  The demand seems to be reasonable that the employer in a prosperous year ought to share with the workmen the profits beyond a limit that capital, risk, enterprise, and superior skill can legitimately claim; and that on the other hand the workmen should stand by the employer in hard times.