the bottom of most troubles. It was the cause of low wages--for without
well-directed work high wages cannot be paid. And if the whole attention
is not given to the work it cannot be well directed. Most men want to be
free to work; under the system in use they could not be free to work.
During my first experience I was not free--I could not give full play to
my ideas. Everything had to be planned to make money; the last
consideration was the work. And the most curious part of it all was the
insistence that it was the money and not the work that counted. It did
not seem to strike any one as illogical that money should be put ahead
of work--even though everyone had to admit that the profit had to come
from the work. The desire seemed to be to find a short cut to money and
to pass over the obvious short cut--which is through the work.

Take competition; I found that competition was supposed to be a menace
and that a good manager circumvented his competitors by getting a
monopoly through artificial means. The idea was that there were only a
certain number of people who could buy and that it was necessary to get
their trade ahead of someone else. Some will remember that later many of
the automobile manufacturers entered into an association under the
Selden Patent just so that it might be legally possible to control the
price and the output of automobiles. They had the same idea that so many
trades unions have--the ridiculous notion that more profit can be had
doing less work than more. The plan, I believe, is a very antiquated
one. I could not see then and am still unable to see that there is not
always enough for the man who does his work; time spent in fighting
competition is wasted; it had better be spent in doing the work. There
are always enough people ready and anxious to buy, provided you supply
what they want and at the proper price--and this applies to personal
services as well as to goods.