Henry A. Atkinson

“ Work is so much a part of our lives that it marks us and puts us in groups. All ministers are very much alike, doctors are alike, lawyers are alike, business men are alike, business women resemble each other, so do miners and woodsmen. In fact, the work that we do groups us automatically with the others in the same profession or trade. Work creates our world for us and also gives us our vocabulary. A man who made his fortune on a big cattle-ranch in the West moved with his family to Chicago. ”

“ The woman’s club, the woman’s place in politics, woman’s interest in industry and in reform have all been cited as being the potent forces at work destroying the home. As a matter of fact it is the man who is chiefly responsible. The strength, the vigor, and the purity of the American home, which show to-day in the splendid type of soldiers that are being sent across the seas to fight in the battle for democracy, speak well for the work of woman. The average man knows where he lives, the number of the house, and the name of the street on which it stands. ”

“ We seldom think of the planting and reaping year after year, the construction of transportation, the building of warehouses, the venturing of money in mill-building, until finally were developed not only the vast farms but also cities, railroads, wheat-carrying steamship lines, elevators, and the mills that go to make up the great bread-making industry. Only when the war interfered with the processes and threatened to cut off the supply of wheat, did we begin to realize how important the wheat farm is to the very life of the nation. ”

“ In these places where men are working to produce the coal for us, and the metals that form the foundation-stone of our civilization, there must be something more than merely the touch of charity; there must be worked out a plan by which true brotherhood may become a reality. We are accepting the gift of these men, the things that they produce at such risk, and we are forgetting the men themselves. They are serving our interests and we have a responsibility for them, but what are we doing to meet the situation? ”

“ The church is making every effort to meet the needs of the individual, but when it preaches the need of regeneration, it must meet the group needs as well, and the minister of a church for a world of labor must be minister to the group as well as to the individual. The world war has impressed upon us many facts, none with more insistence than this—that we are living in a very small world; and that nations, as well as groups of people everywhere, must learn to appreciate each other for what they are, and for the contribution which they are making to the well-being of humanity. ”

“ Just as we sometimes fail to realize how many people are working for us to make our clothes or to produce our food, so we forget the men who are toiling underground to dig the coal and mine the iron upon which we are so dependent for our every-day living. ”

“ We do not like to think of classes in America, but the forces of industrial life have created classes in spite of ourselves.
A World Apart. The workers live in a world apart. Unconsciously they drift together. They talk each other’s language; they understand each other’s point of view. In every town and city we find groups of the workers living to themselves. The work which men do inevitably groups them together; and social life centers9 so completely about their work that it is really the factory and mill that mark out the lines and define the limits within which the classes must live. ”

“ Many well-to-do people living in comfortable circumstances, with position and income assured, assert that if a man wants work he can always find it, and that the only men unemployed are the shiftless and the lazy. Right now the war has absorbed all the surplus labor, and a condition exists different from any that we have previously known in the history of America. Immigration has been cut off and the demands for new enterprises have called for hundreds of thousands of new workers, so that at the present time there is no reason why any man should be out of work. ”

“ In dealing with the problem of the casual worker then, we have two things to take into account: First, we must regularize industry as far as possible, doing away with the extraordinary demands for certain periods that are always followed by long periods of idleness. In the second place, we must in some way lay hold of the individual man, and by surrounding him with the best influences, make it possible for him to live a life of righteousness and sobriety. In other words, we must reduce the amount of seasonal work to the minimum and increase the efficiency of the worker to the maximum. ”

“ Above all, he was warning of the danger that faces us to-day, of becoming so much interested in a man’s social welfare that we lose sight of the emphasis which the great Teacher would put upon the qualities which make up humanity.
We must recognize man as a spiritual being, and everything that goes to make him better physically ought to make him better spiritually. The best work of the church, and the work which God alone can do for the community, is to carry humanity beyond physical betterment into the realm of spiritual idealism. ”

“ The church must interest itself in the problem of recreation. People used to work for a living; now they work for profit. Playtime was formerly not such a problem as it is to-day, for industry was not geared up to the same high pitch of efficiency. To-day the margin of play is about the only margin of an individual’s life when he is really himself. In our cities especially the problem of play is a real problem. The questionable forms of amusement are patronized, not because young men and young women are inherently bad, but because they are the only means of recreation offered. ”

“ It is sheer folly to assume that the working people of our nation are not religious. Religion is as natural to all people as is breathing. The belief in God is well-nigh universal. It is a fact, however, that comparatively few of the mass of workers of our country are connected in any way with the church, or have any part in carrying on the functions of organized religion. There are a great many working people in the churches, but in proportion to the large number of wage-earners in each community there are comparatively few of the actual producers in the churches. ”

“ Women are on the street-car lines and are line women and telegraphers, riveters, blacksmiths, steam-boiler makers, brass workers,164 and foundry workers. In fact, no work seems too hard or too heavy for some woman to make a success of it. From the time of the invention of the cotton-gin, which brought more women into the world of industry than any other one machine, to the present day we have the story of women and men gaining larger visions, receiving better wages, and together making the world a more habitable place for us all. ”

“ Never in the history of the world was there a time when organized religion was more efficient. When was there ever such interest in religious education? so much cooperative effort among Protestant bodies? such an eagerness to discuss ways in which men of widely different views may work together? The money given for missions and social reconstruction reaches proportions that were never dreamed of before. Jesus Christ is recognized to-day as the friend of all men and his salvation is recognized as applying to social, industrial, and educational relationships as well as to individual needs. ”

“ Legislation alone can never achieve the standards now demanded in common by the church and social workers; nor can they be realized by the benevolence of employers. If the health and morals of the community are not to suffer from the employment of women in industry, it can be accomplished only by the cooperation of working women to this end. The church must educate its community to think in terms of the greatest good to the greatest number. And this means that we must come to realize more than ever that the strength of the childhood of the nation is dependent upon the home ”

“ Not only does the fact of being out of a job cut off a man’s means of livelihood, but the psychological effect of being forced to live without working, taken together with the breaking of habits acquired by years of industry, puts a severe strain on the standards of morality which have been built up by long and painful processes.150 The unemployed man may react in one of two ways: he will become an anarchist and spend himself in fighting the system under whose injustice he suffers, or he will give up the struggle and become a drifter upon the tides of life, a social outcast. ”

“ Everything moves with feverish haste. No one lags. Every man knows his task and does it. He must keep up.
The days are unusually long in the steel-mills. It used to be that the men worked twelve hours a day and seven days a week. This has been changed now in most of the mills, but even yet there is a great deal of twelve-hour work and a great deal of Sunday labor. The rumble of the cranes above the heads of the gnome-like men at work in the building fills our ears with an unearthly sound. ”

“ Herbert Spencer says, “The progress of mankind is in one aspect a means of liberating more and more life from mere toil, and leaving more and more life available for relaxation, for pleasure, culture, travel, and for games.” The struggle for existence consumes so much time that it becomes an end in itself. ”

“ If a man interested in the production of cloth makes more than enough for him to wear, why should he go on working? The answer to this is that, in the modern world, man must trade off his specialized product in order to satisfy his own needs and those of his family.
The Machine. The enterprise of clothing the world is made possible by machinery. Man has never produced more marvelous results than in the development of the intricate, huge, and costly machines which fashion the fabrics from which we make our clothes. These tools give man a thousand hands where before he had only two. ”

“ Probably some of our modern churches are so fine that these people would have been considered out of place; but it was to these people that Jesus preached his gospel in the first place, and from them the influence of Christianity spread until the whole life of the Roman world was brought under the control of the new gospel. Now, of course, all the laboring groups that we have been considering are not made up of the poorest people in the community. The heart of the great mass of the people is sound to the core; their principles are strong and their morals are uncorrupted. ”

“ The call and the opportunity of the church are urgent in that great part of the world of work which produces the things that we eat. Shall those who feed others themselves be denied the bread of life? ”

“ When the church cannot get any one else to do a certain task, then the church must shoulder the responsibility itself. The church ought to cooperate with the united charities of the community. It will not be enough for it to have merely a member or two on the boards of these organizations; the church as an organization must be in close touch with them, furnishing money and workers, and helping to plan and carry out the plans of the organization. Above all, it must supply the proper spirit of love which will offset that professionalism which is to-day a growing evil in all charitable effort. ”

“ In this statement we have summed up the philosophy of all workers. It is only when we desire something better than we have and are willing to work for the thing desired that we begin to advance. Luxuries are the things that are not essential for mere existence, but they are the things that are of infinite value in enriching and adding to the meaning of life. ”

“ In the cotton-mills a worker is a worker and little or nothing else.
The motion-picture furnishes amusement and recreation,43 and it gives a glimpse of larger aims and new motives. The girls who dress up in their fine clothes and gaudy hats and go to the city whenever they have a chance are trying to express themselves. Inherently they have fine traits of character, but out of their ignorance and lack of experience they are unable properly to balance the proportion of color and style and make these to fit in with the facts of every-day life. There is no one to teach them ”

“ There never has been a time when women were not in industry. When the loom left the home, women followed it into the factory. More than eight million women and girls were employed in gainful occupations outside the home in the United States just before the war began. This number has been increased, yet it is not out of proportion to the number of women in the country. It is logical that women should continue in industry. A woman must live, and for her living a certain amount of money is required. ”

“ Individualism is praised as being the means of saving the worker. The result is that there is a shockingly large amount of labor turn-over each year—that is, each job has two or three men working on it. We have presented to us also the spectacle of thousands of men who form an army of migratory laborers. In one part of the United States there will be a labor shortage and in another there will be a shortage of work to be done. ”

“ Most of the union leaders have viewed with alarm the increasing number of women that are being drafted into industry each year. The reasons for this are clear to all who know the history of trade unionism and know how the workmen greet the coming into industry of any new group of available workers. The war has made labor conditions chaotic; and the shortage in certain lines has given opportunity for the employers to substitute women for men, because women for the most part are economically defenseless and, therefore, can be secured for a lower wage than men. ”

“ The community’s responsibility for the man out of work does not end with securing a job for him, nor with the regularizing of industry, nor in supporting labor exchanges. We are all creatures of circumstances and influenced strongly by our environment. Therefore, every community ought to provide adequate means for recreation, and decent places where men and women can gather under wholesome conditions.
The casual workers are the true servants of humanity. ”