acts of the industrial problem, and, with
far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will,
according to the eternal laws, return even the good things
of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen
with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and
entertainments. They are encouraging and stimulating the
formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and
clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and
mental interest. All this can be done at comparatively small
cost. The men in the employ of a great establishment can be
taught a new interest in their task as they learn to
understand its processes and the relation of these processes
to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures,
etc. Such work as this is a work that demands the
leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can
best furnish. At the last session of the Social Science
Association an interesting paper sketched some of these
efforts. In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers
use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which
has exhausted its own interest in its task?

Such personal interest on the part of employers in their
employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the
uninterestedness of labor--its lack of identification with
the welfare of capital--its lack of any feeling of loyalty
toward the capitalist. How can anything else be fairly
expected in our present state of things from the _average_
workingman under the _average_ employer? I emphasize the
"average" because there are employees of exceptional
intelligence and honor, as there are employers of
exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their
men. The received political economy has taught the average
workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those
of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an
inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw,
on which capital goes up as labor goes down. As things are,
there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as
the workman sees.

Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of
the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875
the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in
over 2,000 es