latter has constantly and traditionally urged upon the workingman the
specialized virtues of thrift, industry, and sobriety--all virtues
pertaining to the individual. When each man had his own shop, it was
perhaps wise to lay almost exclusive stress upon the industrial virtues
of diligence and thrift; but as industry has become more highly
organized, life becomes incredibly complex and interdependent. If a
workingman is to have a conception of his value at all, he must see
industry in its unity and entirety; he must have a conception that will
include not only himself and his immediate family and community, but the
industrial organization as a whole. It is doubtless true that dexterity
of hand becomes less and less imperative as the invention of machinery
and subdivision of labor proceeds; but it becomes all the more
necessary, if the workman is to save his life at all, that he should get
a sense of his individual relation to the system. Feeding a machine with
a material of which he has no knowledge, producing a product, totally
unrelated to the rest of his life, without in the least knowing what
becomes of it, or its connection with the community, is, of course,
unquestionably deadening to his intellectual and moral life. To make
the moral connection it would be necessary to give him a social
consciousness of the value of his work, and at least a sense of
participation and a certain joy in its ultimate use; to make the
intellectual connection it would be essential to create in him some
historic conception of the development of industry and the relation of
his individual work to it.

Workingmen themselves have made attempts in both directions, which it
would be well for moralists and educators to study. It is a striking
fact that when workingmen formulate their own moral code, and try to
inspire and encourage each other, it is always a large and general
doctrine which they preach. They were the first class of men to organize