ife in their work. One of the by-products
of large-scale industry and the accompanying subdivision of labor has
been the worker's inevitable lack of interest in the monotonous job.
Since too long hours spent at mechanical, repetitious labor result in
a lowered standard of efficiency, and rebellion on the part of the
worker, there has followed a continual tendency toward a reduction in
the length of the working day. The fewer hours spent on the job, the
greater the opportunity conditions outside industry proper have to
exert their influence on character formation. With the shorter working
day there develop more pressing reasons than ever for the emphasis on
off-the-plant activities, and wholesome home and civic conditions. All
these together, and not industry alone, make the worker.

The growth of the spirit and fruit of industrial democracy will not
bring any millennium. It will merely make a somewhat better world to
live in here and now. The dreamers of us forget that in the long run
the world can move only so far and so fast as human nature allows for,
and few of us evaluate human nature correctly. The six industrial
experiences in this book have made me feel that the heart of the world
is even warmer than I had thought--folk high and low are indeed
readier to love than to hate, to help than to hinder. But on the whole
our circles of understanding and interest are bounded by what our own
eyes see and our own ears hear. The problems of industry are
enormously aggravated by the fact that the numbers of individuals
concerned even in particular plants, mills, mines, factories, stretch
the capacities of human management too often beyond the possibilities
of human understanding and sympathy. More or less artificial machinery
must be set up to bring management and men in contact with each other
to the point where the problems confronting each side are within
eyesight and earshot of the other. Up to date it has been as
impossible for labor to understand the difficulties of management as
for management to understand the difficulties of labor. Neither side
ever got within shouting distance of the other--except, indeed, to
shout abuse! Many a strike would have been averted had the employer
been willing to let his workers know just what the conditions were
which he had to face; or had the workers in other instances shown any
desire to take those conditions into account.

For, when all is said and done, the real solution of our i