ordinary processes
of business operation. This policy it tempered with concern for the
workers--suggesting to the millers that they put their "skilled and
faithful" employees on a monthly pay system. It appointed a committee to
draw up rules and regulations to be observed in the operation of the
industry, and to keep it informed.

5.--In the coming years there will take place in the United States much
controversy and a great variety of experiments in wage settlement. To
the realists of all parties, this course of controversy and
experimentation will appear to be only a struggle for power. To the
rest, it may appear that there are ideas at work; ideas springing partly
from the example of political change, and partly from the fact that the
industrial world has undergone such a rapid revolution. It is impossible
to predict the ideas which will have the most abiding force. It is
impossible even to assert that society will make a satisfactory choice
among them.

In the present confusion of counsel, two relatively new ideas, in
particular, appear to me to be likely to endure and be accepted by
society. The first is the idea that the welfare of the wage earners in
each particular industry is one of the major questions in the conduct of
that industry; and that the wage earners should participate effectively
in those activities of direction by which the conditions of labor are
determined. The second idea is that the whole body of wage earners in
industry should possess the means of checking the action of private
enterprise, when they can prove clearly that the methods of production
that are being pursued are wasteful either of human or of material
resources. An example of such a protest is that of the English coal
miners against the organization of their industry--which was one of the
grounds for the appointment of the Coal Commission. It would not appear
to be impossible to reconcile the action of private investment and
private enterprise with this concept of the right of the wage earners to
exert control over the policy of production, in so far as they can
establish the fact that human or material resources are not being well
applied--the general interest being the test.

The main current of industrial change will be, in my opinion, in the
direction indicated by these two ideas. And change in that general
direction is, it seems to me, essential to the peaceful conduct of
industry, for only in some such way will a sense o