ions more satisfactory to the
workman we may accept as one of the chief results of the war.
Politically the laborer is prepared to assert his independence. Both
his social and his industrial status are likely to be improved. He
will be better safeguarded against unemployment. Wages in the old form
and the old tradition that the worker has no contract with his
employer will, in all probability, be less generally acceptable. Work,
if these new conditions are realized, will mean more to the worker.
His own interests and the purposes of his work will be more
harmoniously related. The individual made more secure in his work,
protected more by law and participating more in the affairs of
business and government, will have a sense of playing a more dignified
part in the social economy. Conceal as we may the inferiority of the
laborer's position under the pretenses of democracy and liberty and
equality, this inferiority of position exists and the inequality that
prevails in democratic society is certainly one of the fertile sources
of evil in the world to-day. We have still to see to what extent the
workman, his lot ameliorated in many ways, and his position changed,
will himself become a new and different man, and thus make the world
itself a different place in which to live. All that is thus suggested
we have a right at least to hope for now. If it is also worked for
with intelligence and good will, why should it not come to pass?

The third idea which is beginning to make great changes in the whole
field of the industrial life and throughout all the practical life is
the _idea of economy_. This means that in many ways questions of the
values, the purposes, and the ways and means of what is done in the
world are being sharply examined. Labor has been uncritical of its
purposes, and lavish and wasteful of its energies, however watchful it
may have been of its rights. Production has been governed too much by
desire, too little by careful consideration of need. Distribution has
been carelessly conducted, allowing large losses of time and material.
Consumption has been quite as careless as the rest, and has been
thoroughly selfish as well. The war has changed many of our ideas.
Thrift has become a word with a new meaning. We see what industry at
its worst might do in the world, and on the other hand what wise
control of all the motives and processes that enter into labor and all
the economic life might accomplish.

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