value of shares, and when profits appear to be
made, not by efficient production, but by skilful financiering or
shrewd commercial tactics, they no longer appear meritorious. If, in
disgust at what he has learned to call "profiteering," the consumer
seeks an alternative to a system under which product is controlled by
"Business," he can hardly find it except by making an ally of the
managerial and technical _personnel_ of industry. They organize the
service which he requires; they are relatively little implicated,
either by material interest or by psychological bias, in the financial
methods which he distrusts; they often find the control of their
professions by business men who are {177} primarily financiers
irritating in the obstruction which it offers to technical efficiency,
as well as sharp and close-fisted in the treatment of salaries. Both
on public and professional grounds they belong to a group which ought
to take the initiative in promoting a partnership between the producers
and the public. They can offer the community the scientific knowledge
and specialized ability which is the most important condition of
progress in the arts of production. It can offer them a more secure
and dignified status, larger opportunities for the exercise of their
special talents, and the consciousness that they are giving the best of
their work and their lives, not to enriching a handful of uninspiring,
if innocuous, shareholders, but to the service of the great body of
their fellow-countrymen. If the last advantage be dismissed as a
phrase--if medical officers of health, directors of education,
directors of the co-operative wholesale be assumed to be quite
uninfluenced by any consciousness of social service--the first two, at
any rate, remain. And they are considerable.

It is this gradual disengagement of managerial technique from financial
interests which would appear the probable line along which "the
employer" of the future will develop. The substitution throughout
industry of fixed salaries for fluctuating profits would, in itself,
deprive his position of half the humiliating atmosphere of predatory
enterprise which embarrasses to-day any man of honor who finds himself,
when he has been paid for his services, in possession of a surplus for
which there is no assignable reason. Nor, once large incomes from
profits have been extinguished, need his salary be large, {178} as
incomes are reckoned to-day. It is said that