r Bolshevik pictures all labor eager
and anxious and capable of actually controlling industry. The fact of
the matter is that most individuals from any and every walk of life
prefer to sidestep responsibility. Yet everyone does better under
some. Too much may have a more disastrous effect than not enough--to
the individual as well as industry. Here again is where there must be
caution in generalizing. Each employer has a problem of his own. Nor
can the exact amount of responsibility necessary to call out maximum
efficiency and enthusiasm ever be determined in advance.

I have talked to numerous employers whose experience has been the
same. At first their employees showed no desire for any added
responsibility whatever. Had there not been the conviction that they
were on the right track, the whole scheme of sharing management with
the workers would have been abandoned. Little by little, however,
latent abilities were drawn out; as more responsibilities were
intrusted to the workers, their capacities for carrying the
responsibilities increased. In two cases that I know of personally,
the employees actually control the management of their respective
companies. In both these companies the employers announced that their
businesses were making more money than under one-sided management.

On the whole, this development of the partnership idea in industry is
a matter of the necessary intellectual conviction that the idea is
sound--whether that conviction be arrived at _via_ ethics or "solid
business judgment"--to be followed by the technical expert who knows
how to put the idea into practice. That he will know only after
careful study of each individual plant as a situation peculiar unto
itself. He is a physician, diagnosing a case of industrial anaemia. As
in medicine, so industry has its quacks--experts who prescribe pink
pills for pale industries, the administration of which may be attended
with a brief show of energy and improvement, only to relapse into the
old pallor. As between a half-baked "expert" and an "ignorant"
employer whose heart is in the right place--take the employer. If he
sincerely feels that long enough has he gone on the principle, "I'll
run my business as I see fit and take suggestions from no one"; if it
has suddenly come over him that, after all, the employee is in most
ways but another like himself, and that all this time that employee
might be laboring under the notion, often more unconscious than
c