he is not
bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous to
society. We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and help him in it.
Virtue is a surplus.

4. This is the first humble, stuttering speech the competent modern
employer who proposes to express himself to his men, and get them to
understand him and work with him, is going to make. He is going to pick
out one by one every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly
desire to be selfish, and help him in it. He is going to do something or
say something that will make the man see, that will make him believe for
life, that the most powerful, the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted
man he can find in the world to be his partner in being decently,
soundly, and respectfully selfish--is his employer.

No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man except by
working down through to the inner organic desire in the man as a man,
except by waking his selfishness up and by making it a larger, fuller,
nobler, weightier selfishness, and turning the full weight of it every
minute, every hour, on his daily work.

The best language an employer can find to express this desire at first
to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest copartnership.

5. The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination about other people
because he is not allowed any about himself. The moment he is, and the
moment his employer arranges his work so that he sees every minute all
day that the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent. better counts.
30 per cent. more on his own main purpose in life, his imagination is
touched about himself and he begins to work like a human being. When a
man has been allowed to work awhile as a human being he will begin to be
human with a wider range. Being a partner touches the imagination and
wakes the man's humanness up. He not only works better, but he loves his
family better when he sees he can do something for them. He serves his
town better and his lodge better when he sees he can do something for
them.

6. Being a partner wakes the man's imagination toward those who work
with him, and toward the public and the markets and the goods and the
cities where the goods go. He reads newspapers with a new eye. He
becomes interested in people who buy the goods, and in people who do
not. Why do they not? He gropes toward a general interest in human
nature, and begins to live.

7. A man who is being paid wages one night in a week,