The employer's conception of goodness for his men had been cleanliness, decency of living, and, above all, thrift and temperance.

Means had been provided for all this, and opportunities had also been given for recreation and improvement.

But this employer suddenly found his town in the sweep of a world-wide moral impulse.

A movement had been going on about him and among his working men, of which he had been unconscious, or concerning which he had heard only by rumor.
Outside the ken of philanthropists the proletariat had learned to say in many languages, that "the injury of one is the concern of all." Their watchwords were brotherhood, sacrifice, the subordination of individual and trade interests, to the good of the working classes, and they were moved by a determination to free that class from the untoward conditions under which they were laboring.
Compared to these watchwords, the old ones which this philanthropic employer had given his town were negative and inadequate.

He had believed strongly in temperance and steadiness of individual effort, but had failed to apprehend the greater movement of combined abstinence and concerted action.