Manufacturers ought to see this problem and hasten to solve it.  Those who profit most by the present factory system ought, in all justice, to be held responsible to those who suffer most from it.  They ought to be held morally bound to make up to them in some way the interest in life that has gone out with the old handicrafts.  They could interest their hands out of the working hours, and in ways that would give them a new interest in their working hours. * * *

Not a few of our manufacturers are already opening their eyes to the facts of the industrial problem, and, with far-seeing generosity and human brotherliness that will, according to the eternal laws, return even the good things of this world unto them, they are providing their workingmen with libraries, reading-rooms, and halls for lectures and entertainments.  They are encouraging and stimulating the formation of literary and debating societies, bands, and clubs, and such other things as give social fellowship and mental interest.  All this can be done at comparatively small cost.  The men in the employ of a great establishment can be taught a new interest in their task as they learn to understand its processes and the relation of these processes to society at large, which can easily be done by lectures, etc.  Such work as this is a work that demands the leadership, the organizing power, which the employer can best furnish.  At the last session of the Social Science Association an interesting paper sketched some of these efforts.  In what wiser way could our wealthy manufacturers use a portion of the money won for them by the labor which has exhausted its own interest in its task?

Such personal interest on the part of employers in their employees leads up to a clue to that other branch of the uninterestedness of labor—­its lack of identification with the welfare of capital—­its lack of any feeling of loyalty toward the capitalist.  How can anything else be fairly expected in our present state of things from the average workingman under the average employer?  I emphasize the “average” because there are employees of exceptional intelligence and honor, as there are employers of exceptional conscientiousness, anxious to do fairly by their men.  The received political economy has taught the average workingman that the relations of capital and labor are those of hostile interests; that profits and wages are in an inverse ratio; that the symbol of the factory is a see-saw, on which capital goes up as labor goes down.  As things are, there is unfortunately too much ground for this notion, as the workman sees.

Mr. Carroll D. Wright, in the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor (1883), shows that in 1875 the percentage of wages paid to the value of production, in over 2,000 establishments, was 24.68; and that in 1880 it was 20.23.  This means that the workingmen’s