concerted action. With all his fostering, the president had not attained
to a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined that
virtue for them largely meant absence of vice.

When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak more
fairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employees
appealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quite
sure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not be
deserted by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified and
well-organized union toward the workmen in a "non-union shop," who had
contributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moral
power.

In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for an
instant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imagine
that he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must have
considered the moral ruin about him. He stood throughout for the
individual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen of
his youth; those which had enabled him and so many of his
contemporaries to rise in life, when "rising in life" was urged upon
every promising boy as the goal of his efforts.

Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely nothing. The
morals he had advocated in selecting and training his men did not fail
them in the hour of confusion. They were self-controlled, and they
themselves destroyed no property. They were sober and exhibited no
drunkenness, even although obliged to hold their meetings in the saloon
hall of a neighboring town. They repaid their employer in kind, but he
had given them no rule for the life of association into which they were
plunged.