antages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming--"

"But, Mr. Fein, if it's just as hard on the employers as it is on the
employees, then the whole system is bad."

"Good Lord! of course it's bad. But do you know anything in this world
that isn't bad--that's anywhere near perfect? Except maybe Bach fugues?
Religion, education, medicine, war, agriculture, art, pleasure,
_anything_--all systems are choked with clumsy, outworn methods and
ignorance--the whole human race works and plays at about ten-per-cent.
efficiency. The only possible ground for optimism about the human race
that I can see is that in most all lines experts are at work showing up
the deficiencies--proving that alcohol and war are bad, and consumption
and Greek unnecessary--and making a beginning. You don't do justice to
the big offices and mills where they have real efficiency tests, and if
a man doesn't make good in one place, they shift him to another."

"There aren't very many of them. In all the offices I've ever seen, the
boss's indigestion is the only test of employees."

"Yes, yes, I know, but that isn't the point. The point is that they are
making such tests--beginning to. Take the schools where they actually
teach future housewives to cook and sew as well as to read aloud. But,
of course, I admit the very fact that there can be and are such schools
and offices is a terrible indictment of the slatternly schools and
bad-tempered offices we usually do have, and if you can show up this
system of shutting people up in treadmills, why go to it, and good luck.
The longer people are stupidly optimistic, the longer we'll have to wait
for improvements. But, believe me, my dear girl, for every ardent
radical who says the whole thing is rotten there's ten clever
advertising-men who think it's virtue to sell new brands of soap-powder
that are no better than the old brands, and a hundred old codgers who
are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly
happy--don't know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they're no
worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the
comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system
and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has
no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to
work in--but not till then. And meantime, if the typical business man
with a taste for fishing heard even so mild a radical as I am