Excerpt from Labour Policy, False and True: A Study in Economic History and Industrial Economics

UR great industrial difficulty, under modern conditions, is to combine human development with human work, and persuade people to be industrious. Formerly, men worked to benefit themselves now, they are apt to refrain from work ing for fear they may benefit other persons. The injury to employers from such a course is evident but the detriment to the workers themselves is less obvious, and the calamitous effect on the community is seldom realized. That difficulty is What we call the Labour problem a knowledge of the principles on which it can best be solved is our chief national necessity.

This book strives to criticize the wrong, and indicate the right, solution. The test which it applies is whether a solution places the community before section or party, or is one designed primarily to advance sectarian interests, political or industrial, either avowedly, or speciously, under professions of solicitude for the public good. Nowadays, one has to look well below the surface of words, however distinguished may be their origin. There is little to choose between the revolutionary Socialist, whose solution consists in thrusting industrial democracy into supreme economic or political power through ruthless direct action and then socializing industry, and the constitutional anti-socialist, who would solve the problem by pledges to inaugurate a new industrial Heaven and Earth, and other ninepenny - for - fourpence promises, which he has no honest conviction can be redeemed, and which, if he seriously considered, he would know can never be fulfilled. On the whole, during the last few years, the latter has proved the greater menace to the nation.

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