RENEWAL THROUGH LEISURE
Sta,—Mr. D. G. Pumfrett, in his letter last week, had some hard things to say about the working men of this country, which I would not like to pass unchallenged. May I repeat a sentence from his letter. " It is only by hard work—that is the hard work of all classes of the popu- lation—that we can possibly afford to pay," &c. (My italics.) I suggest that these words of his supply the answer that he is seeking, they explain the strange attitude of the workers he enumerates.
I hope I will be supported by malty employers when I say that any firm that treats their workmen as men, where the employer does his part, need have no fear of ca' canny or idling. The working man will respond to leadership every time, and to very little else. And it must be leader- ship that links the worker with the leader in a common objective, fairly and clearly stated. I would like to deny that the average working man is keen to acquire all kinds of benefits at the liberal hand of the Government ; I will only quote men here, who have paid into the National Health and Unemployment Funds for twenty years, and who have not drawn one penny out. And there are many such men.
I believe the average working man figures his guvnor ' should have three or four times an artisan's wage, and a man in the position of, say, the Editor of The Spectator, should have double as much again, but he does NOT think that a dealer in a commodity market should, in a good day, clean up more than he hiniself can make in a year's skilled work, and he does not think a rich man should get away with Stock Exchange profits without tax. Apart from such thoughts, he certainly does not
desire a classless society. If the working man is satisfied that he has a good guvnor ' and that all hands on the firm are pulling their weight, he will give, and give again. In other words, All Classes of the Popuhl-
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