nothing else. I kept waiting for a summons to the president's office or to the general manager's office. Surely nothing affected the welfare of employees more vitally than a wage cut.

I was still waiting when one day Mr. Jewel, my new chief and Mr. McGill's successor, came into my office, carefully closing behind him the door I always left open. Mr. Jewel was not an outsider. He had been promoted from within the organization.

'I wonder if you've heard,' he said with a serious look, drawing a chair close to the desk. "The cut's been decided on.' 'Decided!'

He nodded. 'Fifteen per cent.'

management's habit of arbitrary decisions in regard to workers was an old growth, deep-rooted. In matters of this sort it functioned almost automatically.

In any event, I had better go to the president. The president was the most reasonable man in the Company, the least ruled by his emotions. In the way of this action stood my aversion to going over the head of a superior. The longer I worked in the business world, the more I respected organization. I decided on the middle course of discussing the matter with another high executive, a scientist, and, according to the nature of scientists, liberally inclined, though not to a point where

How can they do such a thing?'

Mr. Jewel agreed that the cut decided upon would be thoroughly inequitable. But it's decided,' he said. 'I have it from reliable sources.'

'It's not announced yet!' My excitement was growing every minute. 'We must go to the president, or to the plant managers!'

'They have n't asked our advice,' Mr. Jewel reproved me. 'Yes, it's bad, but there's nothing to be done. The managers have decided and they'll hardly reconsider.'

'Why should n't they reconsider?' I persisted, to Mr. Jewel's discomfort. 'What are managers, anyway? Are n't they just human-and fallible?'

Mr. Jewel looked a trifle shocked. "They don't expect us to interfere with wages,' he said, with an air of finality. My thoughts flew back to his predecessor, who had said the same thing.

'They may not expect it, but we should! How can we ever look a worker in the face again if we let this thing go through?'

Had the managers ignored us deliberately? On reflection, I realized that

philosophic considerations. I frankly stated to him what seemed to me the absurdity of a company maintaining an industrial relations department if the department was to be disregarded whenever an industrial relations crisis

arose.

This scholarly and agreeable gentleman was one of the few executives in the Company on an easy footing with the president, respecting without fearing the shy but compelling genius at whose least word so many men trembled, often men of no mean attainments themselves. Within a few hours a special meeting was called. The manager of industrial relations and I were invited to be present.

The wage cut eventually decided on was as high as twenty per cent for certain classes of labor, but it exempted entirely certain other classes, and averaged, instead of fifteen, as originally proposed, about nine per cent.

Winter was coming on. In every factory men sat dumbly before their machines waiting for the foreman's tap on the shoulder. 'Sorry, Bill, but it hits you this time!'

At Mohawk Works No. 1, nearly

for the matter of that, in the city,had been seen standing at a window in his office with the tears streaming down his face as he watched the laidoff men file out.

All the previous winter his men had worked half time. The many months of half time had largely exhausted their savings. Things were getting acute. Some factories in town had resorted to putting two men on the same job, working alternate weeks. Even among the Company plants Mohawk Park had adopted this expedient in preference to laying off men entirely. Strangely, inexplicably, at Mohawk Works No. 1, under Bob Welsh, the most sensitive to human suffering of all the plant managers, it had not been attempted.

One case of distress after another in families of the Mohawk Works' laid-off men was discovered. Finally I asked the general manager why Mohawk Works had not tried, as other factories were doing, to distribute such work as it had among more of its men.

'Mr. Welsh thinks it would n't work at his plant,' Mr. Burlington told me. 'Would n't work?' I repeated. 'Why not?'

'I did n't ask him.'

Taught by many sessions with busy executives, I knew better than to come unprepared, and I quickly produced my evidence. Jobs of the same type as those at Mohawk Works were being satisfactorily split and shared at numerous other up-State factories.

The general manager looked thoughtful. I hardly see how it can be suggested to Mr. Welsh,' he said, with characteristic delicacy of feeling, 'if he has n't seen it himself.'

'It would n't be appropriate for me to point it out to him, but I should think it would be a perfectly proper suggestion to come from- from the seats of the mighty!'

Mr. Burlington's nobly moulded features relaxed in a slight smile. Although always reluctant to exert pressure, he informed me a few days later that Mr. Welsh had been prevailed on to put the matter up to a division of his works to see whether the five hundred men still working there would share their jobs with five hundred laid-off men. The workmen should decide for themselves.

I awaited their decision with mixed hope and fear. At Mohawk Works, employee representation was in force. Only Bob Welsh, with his twinkling eyes, inimitable nasal drawl, and irresistible stories, could have achieved employee representation in face of the united disapproval of all the other upper executives. The Mohawk Works employees had not been permitted to pass on such major matters as the recent wage cut and lay-offs, but for several years past they had decided many internal affairs. How would the Company's sole experiment in allowing employees a voice in things stand the terrible test that was now to be put upon it? Would men who had been out of work much of the year before vote to put themselves still deeper in the hole in order to let the other fellows come up a little nearer the surface?

It was Bob Welsh himself who came over to tell me. He was a frequent visitor, always poking in his head when he passed my door and saying in a mysterious whisper, 'You still here? Thought you'd been given the sack before this!'

Mr. Welsh's huge apelike figure filled the doorway now. He came slowly toward my desk, - his broad shoulders habitually a little stooped, his long

toward my desk,

I think I had never before realized till that winter the high cost of being sick, the high cost of being born, and the still higher cost of dying. It was doctor, hospital, undertaker bills that had wiped out the men's surplus in nearly every case and left them little or nothing to go on when one of the ever-recurring periods of unemployment, which their fathers had known before them, struck them again.

Our Company employment offices were no longer crowded. The first stage of unemployment had passed. The second stage-apathy-had succeeded. There were no jobs.

And if a job did turn up here or there the Mohawk Company's laid-off men had a slim chance, they soon found, to get it. The very stability of the industry, relatively speaking, its great prestige, worked against its men. As soon as an employer learned they were Mohawk men he would say, 'Nothing doing! About the time we got you broken in, they'd call you back.'

It was at this juncture that a thoughtful, and captivating, Englishman made a visit to the United States. He talked before various organizations on his personal effort to meet the problem of unemployment by a plan he had put into operation in his own factory. He talked in a way that made universities listen, the Academy of Political and Social Science take notice,

and even some American manufac

turers warm up.

A few of the Mohawk Company's executives had chanced to hear Mr. Rowntree. I thought about it a good deal, and at last one day asked the president if he would appoint a committee to study the problem of unemployment as it affected his own company, the committee to make any recommendations its study might suggest.

The committee met almost weekly, sometimes more than once a week, for the greater part of a year. It included a brilliant young statistician, the Company's ranking industrial engineer, an expert accountant, and three production managers. Four of its nine

members were deeply interested in the subject from the start, another speedily became so, and two more were open to argument. The chairman remained from beginning to end good-naturedly vague as to what was going on.

The member whose attitude mattered most was one of the Company's higher executives. Able but unassuming, Mr. Staub revealed himself at the very first meeting. 'I never thought,' he said, quite simply, 'that we had any responsibility whatsoever toward men we laid off.'

An idea such as Wolman's, that industry which depends upon the workers to keep it alive should take care of them when they are unemployed, or Rowntree's, that if, in order to function efficiently, industry retains a reserve of workers to meet its varying demands, it should make provision for the maintenance of the reserve when it cannot be absorbed, struck Mr. Staub with the shock of complete novelty.

It was not long, however, before the committee was working as a unit under the conviction that, if the Mohawk Company had to pay for its own

unemployment, it would take pains to reduce the evil to a minimum, with Mr. Staub not only concurring in this view but offering invaluable suggestions for the unemployment benefit plan which began to take shape.

Practically everything that had been printed on the subject of unemployment was studied and discussed. The Company's own habits were scrutinized. Was it accustomed to planning so as to avoid the necessity of taking on hundreds of men to-day, only to turn them off to-morrow?

The committee tried to keep its proceedings confidential. But no group gathering regularly over so long a stretch of time could fail to arouse curiosity. What it was occupied with leaked out. It trickled outside the Company, to our astonishment as far west as the Pacific coast. From industries all over the country came letters of inquiry.

There were many encouraging signs. The plant managers kept inquiring in regard to the committee's progress. The president was apparently not much interested one way or the other. But, judging from the past, if his plant managers registered their approval of an unemployment benefit plan, he was agreeable to having one. To offset what might have been regarded as the president's indifference, I had never seen the general manager so unmistakably favorable to any proposal of the sort. It appealed both to Mr. Burlington's reason and to his conscience.

It seemed as if the plan in all its detail would never be ready. Spring approached. The unemployment situation, if not materially better in the Company, was generally slightly improved. The committee frankly recognized the fact that the plan had less chance of adoption with every day that the unemployment situation grew better. We harried the clerks to give

us their figures. The chairman, to the other members' consternation, ran off for a holiday. He was pelted with telegrams to return or to authorize his signature, that there might be no further delay. At last a day was appointed for the plant managers to consider the plan. The committee had requested that I should be present at the meeting.

The plan was not intended to afford any relief to the existing situation, and would not become operative till a year after its adoption. It was proposed that a fund should be built up adequate for disbursements in the next period of depression, estimated, if prophecy could be based on industrial history, to come in 1928. Whether it came in 1928 or not, it would recur within an appreciable period.

Copies of the plan were sent to the plant managers in advance of the conference. We expected some, though not insuperable, opposition. I was not, myself, altogether sure of the general manager. We counted, however, on Bob Welsh, the workman's friend.

As fate would have it, during the time the managers were allowed in which to familiarize themselves with the plan before meeting to vote on it, the Chamber of Commerce issued a promised 'Survey.' Offering it as an exhaustive and dispassionate study of unemployment, the Chamber warned its four thousand members against any and all 'panaceas.' The effects of the British dole were dwelt on at length as a horrible, if far from apposite, example. It became plain, among other things, that a movement was on foot to forestall any such bill as had been introduced in the legislatures of Massachusetts and Wisconsin, and to render anathema the very term 'unemployment insurance.'

A startling whisper now began to go around. Mr. Welsh was working