s touch and had nothing
wherewith to help them. The employer's conception of goodness for his
men had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift and
temperance. Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities had
also been given for recreation and improvement. But this employer
suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse. A
movement had been going on about him and among his working men, of which
he had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor.

Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in
many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their
watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual
and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were
moved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditions
under which they were laboring.

Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropic
employer had given his town were negative and inadequate. He had
believed strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, but
had failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence and
concerted action. With all his fostering, the president had not attained
to a conception of social morality for his men and had imagined that
virtue for them largely meant absence of vice.

When the labor movement finally stirred his town, or, to speak more
fairly, when, in their distress and perplexity, his own employees
appealed to an organized manifestation of this movement, they were quite
sure that simply because they were workmen in distress they would not be
deserted by it. This loyalty on the part of a widely ramified and
well-organized union toward the workmen in a "non-union shop," who had
contributed nothing to its cause, was certainly a manifestation of moral
power.

In none of his utterances or correspondence did the president for an
instant recognize this touch of nobility, although one would imagine
that he would gladly point out this bit of virtue, in what he must have
considered the moral ruin about him. He stood throughout for the
individual virtues, those which had distinguished the model workmen of
his youth; those which had enabled him and so many of his
contemporaries to rise in life, when "rising in life" was urged upon
every promising boy as the goal of his efforts.

Of the code of social ethics he had caught absolutely not