If the concern where you are employed is all wrong, and the Old Man is a curmudgeon, it may be well for you to go to the Old Man and confidentially, quietly and kindly tell him that his policy is absurd and preposterous.  Then show him how to reform his ways, and you might offer to take charge of the concern and cleanse it of its secret faults.  Do this, or if for any reason you should prefer not, then take your choice of these:  Get Out, or Get in Line.  You have got to do one or the other—­now make your choice.  If you work for a man, in heaven’s name work for him.

If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him—­speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution that he represents.

I think if I worked for a man, I would work for him.  I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him.  I would give an undivided service or none.  If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage, why, resign your position, and then when you are outside, damn to your heart’s content.  But I pray you, as long as you are a part of an institution, do not condemn it.  Not that you will injure the institution—­not that—­but when you disparage a concern of which you are a part, you disparage yourself.

More than that, you are loosening the tendrils that hold you to the institution, and the first high wind that happens along, you will be uprooted and blown away in the blizzard’s track—­and probably you will never know why.  The letter only says, “Times are dull and we regret there is not enough work,” et cetera.

Everywhere you will find these out-of-a-job fellows.  Talk with them and you will find that they are full of railing, bitterness, scorn and condemnation.  That was the trouble—­thru a spirit of fault-finding they got themselves swung around so they blocked the channel, and had to be dynamited.  They were out of harmony with the place, and no longer being a help they had to be removed.  Every employer is constantly looking for people who can help him; naturally he is on the lookout among his employees for those who do not help, and everything and everybody that is a hindrance has to go.  This is the law of trade—­do not find fault with it; it is founded on nature.  The reward is only for the man who helps, and in order to help you must have sympathy.

You cannot help the Old Man so long as you are explaining in an undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude that he is a curmudgeon and that his system is dead wrong.  You are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up this cauldron of discontent and warming envy into strife, but you are doing this:  you are getting yourself on a well-greased chute that will give you a quick ride down and out.  When you say to other employees that the Old Man is a curmudgeon, you reveal the fact that you are one; and when you tell them that the policy of the institution is “rotten,” you certainly show that yours is.