president of the company had been most ungratefully received, and those
who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the
social consciousness developing among working people. The first defended
the president of the company in his persistent refusal to arbitrate,
maintaining that arbitration was impossible after the matter had been
taken up by other than his own employees, and they declared that a man
must be allowed to run his own business. They considered the firm stand
of the president a service to the manufacturing interests of the entire
country. The others claimed that a large manufacturing concern has
ceased to be a private matter; that not only a number of workmen and
stockholders are concerned in its management, but that the interests of
the public are so involved that the officers of the company are in a
real sense administering a public trust.

This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of an
individual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a mass
of men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moral
rights.

These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has
become organized into a vast social operation, not with the coöperation
of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the
individual owning the capital. There is a sharp divergence between the
social form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as the
employees are more highly socialized and dependent. The president of the
company under discussion went further than the usual employer does. He
socialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen were
living. He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town,
without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or
self-government. He honestly believed that he knew better than they what