An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker by Cornelia Stratton Parker
page 104 of 164 (63%)
page 104 of 164 (63%)
|
yet to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her
Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a marvelous energy--re-lease experience. All our industrial formalism, our conventionalized young manhood, our schematized universities, are instruments of balk and thwart, are machines to produce protesting abnormality, to block efficiency. So the problem of industrial labor is one with the problem of the discontented business man, the indifferent student, the unhappy wife, the immoral minister--it is one of maladjustment between a fixed human nature and a carelessly ordered world. The result is suffering, insanity, racial-perversion, and danger. The final cure is gaining acceptance for a new standard of morality; the first step towards this is to break down the mores-inhibitions to free experimental thinking." If only the time had been longer--if only the Book itself could have been finished! For he _had_ a great message. He was writing about a thousand words a day on it the following summer, at Castle Crags, when the War Department called him into mediation work and not another word did he ever find time to add to it. It stands now about one third done. I shall get that third ready for publication, together with some of his shorter articles. There have been many who have offered their services in completing the Book, but the field is so new, Carl's contribution so unique, that few men in the whole country understand the ground enough to be of service. It was not so much to be a book on Labor as on Labor-Psychology--and that is almost an unexplored field. |
|