the athlete's cheek, to use one of Aristotle's illustrations, indicates a harmony of forces in his body, so contentment in the social order indicates a happy balance between the fixed instinctive heritage of man and the environment. The machine is the servant, not the master, of man's "vital faculties." Where permanent and ineradicable conflict arises between man's instinctive equipment and the machine process, the latter must yield. This enables us to state the problem so far as man's instincts are concerned. It is the problem of altering the machine process so that it neither represses nor overstimulates these instincts but serves as the efficient and necessary instrument for organizing them into the highest type of character.

§3. THE MACHINE PROCESS AND THE LABOR UNION

It is in the opposition of labor to scientific management that the real issue at stake between the worker and the machine process emerges most clearly. We have seen that scientific management as represented by Taylor is a curious mixture of idealism with the last refinement of the machine philosophy. Social service and humanitarianism are blended with the absolutism of natural laws beyond the power of man to change. Social justice is merely a matter of the impartial application of these laws after they have been scientifically determined through time and motion studies. Efficiency and increased production sought by scientific management are conceded by all to be most desirable; upon them will rest in increasing measure the happiness and welfare of future generations. It is, therefore, discouraging to find labor almost uniformly opposed to scientific management. Unionism has for this reason been criticized as opposed to social progress. It is asserted that the union is prompted solely by narrow selfish interests.

On the face of things it would appear that the union is patterned after business organization. It is a monopoly of a commodity, labor, and those having it for sale unite to control the price of their commodity and to increase their bargaining

power. Furthermore, the average worker does not appreciate or understand scientific management; his leaders oppose for political reasons the sympathetic cooperation between worker and employer that it demands; from sad experience the worker has been taught to distrust every move of the employer; he fears the Greeks even when bearing gifts. Finally, Taylor contends that scientific management, based upon a harmony of interests between employer and employe, is organized for peace while the union is organized for war to limit output in the interest of the worker. Granting, as in all probability we should, that there is an element of truth in all these factors, the real issue must still be sought in something more fundamental. It is nothing less than the essential incompatibility between the philosophy of the machine and the ends sought in organized labor. In the analysis of the philosophy of the machine it was found that the machine process exerts a disintegrating and iconoclastic influence upon the bonds that make group life possible. Scientific management is not possible, at least in the sense contemplated by Taylor, without entire freedom to change industrial conditions wherever and whenever newer and more efficient methods and processes in production have been discovered. This places the status of the worker, his wage, his job, his group ideals and his standard of living, completely at the mercy of every mechanical invention or every improvement in method. He becomes merely a human atom, embodying a certain amount of physical energy, which must be fitted into the arbitrary and mechanical demands of the machine process in order to secure through faithful obedience to the laws of physical force the largest production of goods. This is equivalent to asking the worker to sacrifice his group values in order that society may have more goods.

The issue here raised is one of fundamental importance. It is nothing more nor less than a clash between two phases of reality, two measures of values, that of the machine and of the group conscience. The machine process as interpreted in scientific management functions at the level of certain fixed

laws of nature such as causation. The expert is constantly studying these laws through time and motion experimentation. As new tasks, methods, variation in individual skill or whatnot are discovered, the worker is shifted from task to task, from group to group, paid more or less, promoted or discharged according as the economy of these mechanical laws demands for the furthering of the greatest productive possibilities. These shifts of the worker, in order to secure the end sought, must not be disturbed by those thousand and one ties that bind him to his fellows and make him a normally responsible being. They must be allowed to go on and on in their impersonal, unmoral and mechanical pursuit of efficiency. If we deprive scientific management of this supreme right it must abdicate its claim of superiority over the old "initiative and incentive" method. It is then placed at the mercy of human wills and inclinations. To be sure, it will be brought into the field of morals but at the sacrifice of its absolute ideal of mechanical efficiency.

The worker, on the other hand, belongs not only to this level of mechanical law that governs the machine; he knows the love of father and mother, of wife and child; he belongs perhaps to a lodge or a church and experiences the helpfulness of friends; he is a citizen and interested in the fate of democracy; he may have larger cultural interests. The union is the instrument by which these social interests with all that they mean for mental and moral development, for social worth and self-respect, are assured at least a measure of permanence. Across this precious fabric of human values that we sum up under the vague term 'status' the philosophy of the machine, with its impersonal and unmoral effort after productive efficiency, cuts its way with ruthless disregard for the moral chaos it creates. From the standpoint of its philosophy it can consistently say, "None of these things moves me." Against the insidious attacks of the machine process the worker erects the barriers of the closed shop, collective bargaining, and, as a last resort, the strike. For he realizes that when once the philosophy of the machine and profitism are allowed complete

sway in the prosecution and application of time and motion studies or otherwise he must surrender all claims to an independent, influential and self-respecting position in the community; social justice and industrial democracy become little more than an iridescent dream.

The struggle that labor is making, therefore, is for a social status that is not at the mercy of the machine process with its mechanical standardizations. Labor, to be sure, is far from being a distinct functional group with a common body of ethical forms that are accepted by all. There is the greatest variety of workers with diverse ethical codes and with points of conflict as well as of agreement. In fact the great handicap of labor as contrasted with capital is that the latter, thanks to the impersonal and unmoral logic of the machine process, secures the close coordination of interests and the effective prosecution of common ends, whereas among the laboring groups the presence everywhere of the human element makes for diversity and prevents effective coöperation. This wealth of human interests, however, which seems such a sore handicap in the fight for recognition, is in reality labor's great asset. It keeps the spirit of the labor movement in touch with democracy. Where labor is thoroughly organized and socially self-conscious, therefore, as in the England of today, it is no accident that we find it putting into its program the most advanced democratic principles.

It goes without saying that industrial democracy, which seems the only solution of the eternal quarrel between capital and labor, will never come until both have attained a common social point of view, a common body of norms, in terms of which they are willing to adjudicate their differences. It goes without saying, furthermore, that labor will never accept the materialistic philosophy of Mr. Taylor and of other exponents of scientific management according to which labor and capital are to adjust their differences on the basis of a great code of natural and unalterable laws superior to the caprice of human wills. Labor is too passionately human to submit its fate to such tragic metaphysical nonsense. Finally, labor

is in thorough revolt against the economic absolutism of Adam Smith and natural rights, according to which an "invisible hand" prevents the economic atomism of self-interest, entire freedom of contract and unrestricted competition from disintegrating the business world.

In a democracy genuine solidarity of sentiment must come as the product of human wills. If worker and employer ever arrive at a permanent peace it will be through the free and enlightened acceptance of a body of comprehensive norms of human welfare. In a democracy it can not be otherwise, for, as we have had occasion to state repeatedly, the social conscience is only authoritative for free men when it becomes the law that they themselves have accepted for the guidance of their actions. Evidence is not lacking that over and above the two groups of capital and labor eternally pitted against each other, a third group with a more or less unbiased viewpoint is taking shape. This group may form the basis for a body of authoritative sentiment, an enlightened public sentiment, that will not only mediate between the contending parties but will also educate them in time into an appreciation of their common interests. This disinterested element is at present loosely coordinated and lacking in the proper machinery for the expression of its will but it is growing in power and insight.

§ 4. THE LAW, THE WORKER AND THE MACHINE PROCESS

Most important from the standpoint of ethics is the attitude that has been encouraged in the mind of the worker, by the discipline of the machine process and the Great Society, towards some of the traditional norms of the law and the social conscience. As has been suggested in an earlier chapter, the present generation is dependent for the solution of its problems upon the accumulated and tested moral experience of the past. This past experience finds its authoritative embodiment in the social conscience and still more exactly in the law. For the settlement of the vexed questions relating to property,