y either by disregarding the quality of the work or sometimes by
actually lowering it. But at any rate it would be work which would earn
money, and not speculation or assiduous repose in an easy chair.

In the same way, just in so far as industry became organized under
national control for the public benefit, there would be a much closer
correspondence between the quality of the work and the amount of the
reward. In a well-managed corporation a man is promoted because he does
good work, and has shown himself capable of assuming larger
responsibilities and exercising more power. His promotion brings with it
a larger salary, and the chance of obtaining a larger salary doubtless
has much to do with the excellence of the work; but at all events a man
is not rewarded for doing bad work or for doing no work at all. The
successful employee of a corporation has not become disinterested in his
motives. Presumably he will not do any more work than will contribute to
his personal advancement; and if the standard of achievement in his
office is at all relaxed, he will not be kept up to the mark by an
exclusive and disinterested devotion to the work itself. Still, under
such conditions a man might well become better than his own motives.
Whenever the work itself was really interesting, he might become
absorbed in it by the very momentum of his habitual occupation, and this
would be particularly the case provided his work assumed a technical
character. In that case he would have to live up to the standard, not
merely of an office, but of a trade, a profession, a craft, an art, or a
science; and if those technical standards were properly exacting, he
would be kept up to the level of his best work by a motive which had
almost become disinterested. He could not fall below the standard, even
though he derived no personal profit from striving to live up to it,
because the traditions and the honor of his craft would not let him.

The proposed economic policy of reform, in so far as it were successful,
would also tend to stimulate labor to more efficiency, and to diminish
its grievances. The state would be lending assistance to the effort of
the workingman to raise his standard of living, and to restrict the
demoralizing effect of competition among laborers who cannot afford to
make a stand on behalf of their own interest. It should, consequently,
increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average
laborer, diminish his "cla