The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1916-1920, 1919-08-10

business"
As class distinctions are more sharply
drawn in England than in America, the
class war between Labor and Capital has
been more acute overseas than it is ever
likely to be at home. American business
men, however, cannot fail to gain val
liable suggestions from the experience of
Great Britain, where some of the largest
and most important industries have taken
the workers into partnership. giving them
a share In the management of the works
and establishing what seems to be a gen.
uine Industrial democracy.
III.
Details of the development of the con-
dition which led to this state of things,
facts and figures about its actual working
out In practice, and, in an appendix oc-
eupying a good two-thirds of the book,
the full text Of the much talked of Whit
ley report and many other official docu-
ments bearing on Britain's solution Of the
labor problem, are given in Meyer Bloom
fields Management and Mem
Not every British industry has estab-
hshed the SIX hour day; it is not stated
that any of them has as yet That it is
coming and bringing with it increased
productiveness of the industrial plant,
larger profits for all concerned, including
the workers, and enlarged opportunities
for happy living, is the conviction Of Lord
LeverhulIne, better known to fame as Sir
William Lever, soap maker and founder
of Port Sunlight, whose addresses on pub
lie occasions over a number of years have
been edited by Stanley Unwin, gathered
into a volume with an introduction by
Viscount Haldane and published under
the title The. SiE Hour Day.
Liberal and broadminded in his outlook
on life and work, the views Of this hard
headed British business man with high
ideals are good reading, whether he is de-
scrbing to the members of the Maudsley
Congregational Church how Henry Ford
succeeded, telling the Royal Society Of
Arts that the time has come for genuine
eomradeship between capital and labor, or
explaining to the Liverpool Trades and
Labor Council that it is no use talking to
a workingman about a nice, artistic home
with pictures on the walls when he comes
home only to sleep far the next days
work
w.
Lord Leverhulme and other thinkers
who agree that an industrial readjustment
is necessary lay stress upon the necessity
for greater prcductiveness of industrial
plants. Shorter working hours; they point
out, have resulted in increased produc-
ton because the energies of the workers
are not exhausted and they easily do more
in eight hours than they formerly did in
ten for the same OF lower wages And In
increased production these factory owners
see the salvation of the industrial system,
which can only justify its exist-nee by
producing necessary goods in such quanti-
ties that the price of the finished articles
can be kept down to the lowest possible
level.
With that Thorstein Vebfen agrees, in
the little volume called The FeSt ID Inter
ests and the State of the Indas,riGi Arts.
This is a collection of articles originally
published in the lately deceased Dial.
Mr.. Veblen has been hailed in the radi-
cal press as great thinker who has been &.
overlooked by the world for twenty years.
One gets the impression from his book
that he has been thinking for twenty
years about conditions as they existed
twenty years ago and has not looked about
him m that period to note the great
changes that have been going on in the
social structure which he condemns I'M
sparingly. 1t is the manufacturer, the
"vested interest,"" that is responsible for
underproduetion, not the worker he main