SPURS AND INCENTIVES.
TO-DAY industry is fighting for its place among the virtues. It has always been liable to periodic losses of precedence. Men cannot forget the accident of its birth coming as it did into Paradise, an unwanted thing. Unless we make industry and energy interchangeable terms, it will have to be admitted that the highest race has not possessed in- dustry in more abundance than the lower. It is no doubt rare among negroes, but to find it in perfection we must go to ancient Egyptians or modern Chinese. As an essential quality some of the most admirable characters have been without it, and it is by no means always absent in the worst men. But whatever its place among the virtues—and few moralists would give it the highest—it is a sine qua non for the prosperity of a nation. To the salvation of the individual soul it may be matter of very secondary importance, but if a nation is to save its soul alive it must be industrious. There is a wide and ever spreading belief that we are a less hard-working people than we were. If so, the new danger can only be avoided by new in- centives. Many of the old " spurs " have had their day. The very word shows that we trusted to pain as an incentive more generally than we ought to have done. We are no longer willing that because a man is lazy his children should half-starve. 'The community must find new incentives. It is sheer sentimentality to declare that the beat work is done without them. The brain workers are apt to boast—surely they have reason just now te boast—that they are on an average more industrious than the hand workers ; but think how much stronger are their incentives to industry ! To take the "spurs" first—the incentives of pain. If they are idle they sink into a strange milieu where the custom are not their customs, education means something different, and where they are not welcomed. No great guilds or brotherhoods stand at their backs ; no " flat-rate " is suggested to screen their inferior energies and talents. They must see their chil- dren's chances in life destroyed and stand the pitying ridicule of their contemporaries. But let us look at the joyful incentives to labour always before their minds. First comes the fact that their work is full of interest, second the possibility of "rising'" in their profession, of getting a little more money or some dis- tinction, even though it be,only the one it is now the fashion to laugh at, of a handle or a suffix of letters to their names. Again, there is the moral incentive of doing their work exceedingly well. We shall of course be told that this spur is for all, but when we come to practice, is the platitude true ? The man who lays bricks less well than the average of his fellows may be rebuked by his conscience or he may lose his job, but the rebuke is not likely to be very severe, and the danger of dismissal is not at all great. Indeed, is it not true that if he does his worst he endangers his position less than if he does his very best ? He is told to avoid his beet out of consideration for inferior work- men. But if the lawyer loses a case by his carelessness, his repu- tation suffers, and his client suffers ; and if he is either an ambi- tious or a conscientious man, he must wince inwardly as he looks at the mess he has made of his work. The same thing is true in a much greater degree of a doctor ; and, indeed, is in some measure true of every professional man. Again, loyalty to a chief is a great incentive, and it is far more operative among brain than hand workers. Since we grew commercially so great, the personal link between employer and employed has become a slighter and slighter one. If the foremen of the various trader had succeeded in obtaining the loyal affection of the men they command, the breaking of the old tie would have mattered little. Judging, however, by the way that working men talk of their overseers, no relation exists of a nature to call forth a generous enthusiasm of service. Thus what might be a powerful inoentive to labour is absolutely inoperative. Praise and blame play little part in a young workman's existence ; and though the various trades are full of esprit de corps, jt shows itself much more as "fellow-feeling," in sympathy, and desire for corporate com- fort, than as an incentive to fine or successful or harmonious and therefore effectual work. In the Middle Ages the brick- layers had apparently an intense corporate wish to build a fine cathedral. Now such bricklayers would be moved by an intense wish to maintain while building It a high standard of civilization for the most gifted and the meanest members of the gang. It is a noticeable fact that so many of the builders of the past carved their names on their work. Distinction as an incentive cannot be safely disregarded. The present writer heard the other day from a Canadian of the building of a church upon a lonely island off the coast of Canada. The inhabitants are poor and wood is scarce. Yet wood was gladly given and built up into the sacred edifice, but only on condition that every giver and every worker had his name inscribed on the logs he had given or laid.
Is it possible to insist with too much reiteration that the wise men of the world should put their heads together to find in- centives to industry ? A knowledge of the world and of the human heart is what is wanted to inform their councils. There Is an immense deal of work which must be done which no in- genuity can render interesting. That great incentive a vast mass of operatives must go without. Nature has her own secret attraction. It is impossible to believe that agricultural work can ever be really dull. A whim may take hold of a nation and may last for a generation or two which leads to the desertion of the field ; but Nature rewards industry too certainly and too wonderfully to be long without labourers to share her miraculous renewals. The mechanical work of an industrial population, the service of machinery, cannot be made inspiring. Some system will have to be thought out by which the advantages of piece- work are retained without its disadvantages. Human nature seems to require prizes, or it loses heart. To suggest that a new spirit might arise among the foremen which would supply men with a motive for doing their best is perhaps Utopian. It will perhaps be regarded as mere old-fashioned folly to imagine that if these posts could be filled by young men of thought and education who must make a living somehow, and for whom there is no room in the professions of their fathers, It would be more possible to introduce loyalty as a common incentive to conscientious work. In a desperate situation any safeguard -wans worth consideration. Surely, however, the question of -iistinction has not been enough considered. It is not an acquired taste, but a natural craving. Men will work themselves to death for it ; but how is it to be obtained by a member of a mass of working men who are all paid alike ? There ought to be something which corresponds to a title, and which a man need not detach himself from his natural surroundings in order to obtain. Who is to bestow it and how its recognition is to be insured are puzzling questions ; but if the sentimental thinkers who at present have a monopoly of incentives would only cease to declare them useless, practical men might get a hearing, and the work of the world stand a better chance of getting properly done. The hand workers believe that the brain workers are inimical out of self-interest to what is ordinarily called Socialism. Certainly the brain workers would have the most to lose by it. For one thing, they would lose their pleasant incentives to labour. In a dead level of State-organized equality they would find work dull. They are apt to forget that the mass of the workmen of this country have not had these delights. They have only known the spur. Every joyful incentive to work tends to "take the shine out" of Socialism more surely than a hundred argu- ments.
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