n with ours. Perhaps ours are better--for us.
Perhaps, too, ours will be better for him when he is like us (if we can
give him any reason to want to be). In the meantime, what is there that
can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is and in
allowing a sliding scale of motives in people? Starving people and
slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful, _i.e._, not really quite
bright toward others, who impute mean, inaccurate motives to them, can
only be patiently expected to have a very small area or even mote of
unselfishness at first. A cross-section of our society to-day represents
the entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years. We
need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go down the street.
All history is here this minute.

We wish that Labour had better motives. We wish to get our workmen to
understand us better and believe in us more and work for us harder.

We agree that we must begin with them, if we propose to do this, where
they are.

Where are they?

There are certain general observations that might seem to the point.

1. If a man is a sane and sound man and works hard, he must feel that
everything he does, every minute, is definitely connected with the main
through-train purpose in his life.

2. If the main purpose in his life is domestic and consists in having
his family live well and giving his children a chance, he must feel and
be absolutely sure when he is working better or working worse for his
employer that he is working better or worse for himself and for those
for whom he lives.

3. In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness or house
patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit. It is the elementary
form of his national or human enthusiasm. It is the form of
disinterestedness that has to be attended to in men first; and the way
for society to get the labouring man to be public-spirited, to have the
habit of considering the rights of others, is for society to have the
habit of considering his rights in his daily work. An intelligent, live
man must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish on, if
only in the privacy of his own family. Unselfishness begins in small
circles. The starving man must be allowed a smaller range of
unselfishness than the man who has enough. It is not uncomplimentary or
unworthy in human nature to admit that this is so--to demand that the
human being who is starving must be allowed to be selfish. If