He honestly believed that he knew better than they what was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct his business.

As his factory developed and increased, making money each year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in the same way.
He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise.

Under this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization, and systematically treated on the individual basis.
Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial control to domestic and social arrangements.

They felt the lack of democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence.
The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out their desires, and without any organization through which to give them social expression.

The president of the company was, moreover, so confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the men.