Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Democracy and Social Ethics by Jane Addams
page 86 of 162 (53%)
was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct
his business. As his factory developed and increased, making money each
year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in
the same way.

He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions
of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our
industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise. Under
this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization,
and systematically treated on the individual basis.

Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than
industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial
control to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack of
democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these
matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence.
The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing
the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out
their desires, and without any organization through which to give them
social expression. The president of the company was, moreover, so
confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the
righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the
men. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his
employees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually took
toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no
thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands
for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard
of the men's needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory,
which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It is
possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of
DigitalOcean Referral Badge