The Columbus dispatch. (Columbus, Miss.) 19??-1922, 1920-08-18

Canada coming now to the smaller
cities I believe the alert employer can
discover, if he searches, a definite tens
deney among his men to accept work
in larger eenters where there ara
more comprehensive school courses for
them or their children.
The indications that have brought
me to this opinion win have weight,
! hope, with the reader was pass
ing through a composing room, some
20 years ago, when a young linotype
operator asked me if could talk with
him minute.
did you notice" he asked without
preliminary, shat the Moseley Com
mission scored the schools of Indiana
polls higher than ours here in the
District of Columbia? Well, now,
what would you say? I've boy
that's five and of course it's little
early to be thinking about putting
him in school. But I've got chance
to get a job in Indianapolis and I'd
like that boy of m inc to have the
best teaching in America if l could get
it for him."
Within this past year | was speak
ing to the Central Labor Union of
Knoxville, Tennessee. The object of
the meeting was to enlist all the peo-
pie, but work-people in particular,
behind broad project for the better
upbuilding Of the city. 1t was the
best meeting of long series, but the
sailing was not the smoothest in the
world as will be understood from this
one out of many questions:
"You say, sir, that our employer is
interested in usofor something besides
making money out of US, that he and
his men are partners as citizens, and
all like that Well, sir, I'd like to ask
you, sir, if that's so, and don't say
it isn't, why is it they don't help us
more where they can help us without
its costing them much of anything?
| "How is it those rich men haven't
thought about us enough to give us a
better high school building than the
one they're putting up now? | work
on it and | know. And | tell you there
isn't fire-proof room in the building
Why the very stairs is wood.
"If l can't send my boy to better
school than that can get work in
Nashville, or some other progressive.
city,"
Some Reasons That Would Have
Swung Them Over.
From large majority of humid
red men there was not the slightest
revelation that the church in their
lives had been related by its spokes-
men to the practical conditions and
interests of their lives. Suppose it
had been possible for me to say that
in Niles they could have found
Another, though smaller, congre-
cation like st. Georges Of New York
City. Or IN
/ A preaching in practical terms like
that of Beecher. Or
/ An understanding of the gospel of
recreation like that of the Mormons
(andI am no Mormon, myself). Or
An informing religious and social
leadership like that of Gypsy Smith.
know that if could have held out
such religious appeal, could have
smoothed away some of the resistance
that then obstructed the plans of the
employer
These were railroad men. They
were a little higher in the social scale
than many other workmen. Neverthe-
less they point the employer to an
understanding of the prerequisites he
must help procure for his men if he
is to keep the best of them. They
enable me to illustrate one of the first
fundamentals to the understanding of
/ the employer who would get new men
and keep them:
That the things which representative
workmen in the United States and
Canada want for their families in 1920
are identically the things the rep
resentative employers want for their
families.