The Birmingham age-herald., 1920-03-24
For the Good of
 the Community

not directly connected with the World War the telephone systems of the United States broke down during those four or five horrible years in which Europe was convulSed with the slaugh- ter of lives and the destruction of prop erty
 And like most everything else the tele- < phone systems have not recovered en- tirely Some of them show very slight, if any, improvement since the signing ofthe armistice
 The public, that is that portion of the public that uses the telephone has grown tired ''cussing" the telephone systems, realizing that nothing good has come of 1t, and perhaps never will.
 Everything and everybody connected with the telephone systems, from the patient non-dividend receiving stock holder through the officials and on down to the apprentice operator has been sworn att until the public, in disgust, has given up all hope of improved con- ditions
 Perhaps, everybody is little to blame. At least, everyone to whom blame for the poor service has been attributed has shifted, or tried to shift, the responsibility to somebody else. Officials say they can not get materials and equipment and full complementS of efficient operators Op- orators say they are OverW0rked and that the telephone users are impatient and aDuslve. Telephone users say the opera tors are inefficient and the officials in- different And so on without end
 The New York Globe, in a recent editorial att tempts an explanation when it says:
 Good telephone service depends partly on the morale of the operators, and the morale of the operators QoDon0S If have to do, the strain they must endure and the treatment they receive from their employers and from the public9
 Commenting on the Globe editorial the Wall Street Journal says:
 How broad and impartial that sounds! And how utterly and mischievioulsly it eNades the vital tissue! If it could be reduced to percentages, it might be said that the morale of, these workers IS affected perhaps 40 per cent by the work, the strain of it and the treatment received from the employer and the user of the telephone. Is there not at least another 50 per cent of morale which must come from the seeds of honesty and good faith planted in the soul of the worker and grow ing fruitfuly outward into good work for good works sake? What will the Globes 40 per cent do for the Hello girl in the way of morale if her own rightfeeing is treated as negligible factor in such proposition?
 Tt is squarely up to the public-Wa Washington and Wall street, Harvard and Public School 27, millionaire and maid-servant all of us, working together under God The problem is so largely a spiritual one thatit calls for a sermon to deal with it. however feeble the preacher. Here we have seen the teaching of newspaper of honest purpose and high ideals, and the predominant spiritual factor is left out. It is teachers and preachers who have this work to do. However, they may dogmatize about unreenting economic law in it's stern operation, they wlfind that noth- ing can be economically right which is morally wrong"
 And the Manufacturers Record adds the fol- lowing advice:
 ''This doctrine needs to be taught everywhere and to be followed by all of us. Until employer and employe, buyer and seller, farmer and city man, corporation and its men deal with each other as they would have others do unto them, there can be no safety or salvation, here or hereafter, for the individual man or the country or the-world. The rate of wages, for instances cannot morally be regulated simply by the supply and demand and by the need of job by the laborer. The work of the laborer cannot morally be regulated merely by his ability to retain his job. Each one must give full measure of honest work of honest trad ing, with another or else our work will be moral ly unsound and therefore economically unsQpnd. Temporary success on any other basis cannot last, for the foundation is false and the structure will sooner or later collapse
 The millennium is not here, nor Is the perfect man or woman whether he be capitalist or la borer, preacher or teacher or layman., Met get