[Black and White by Timothy Thomas Fortune]@TWC D-Link book
Black and White

CHAPTER XVI
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The result of all this relationship has been that during some fifteen years of the management of this large business he has rarely changed his men, and while strikes have abounded around him he has never known a strike.
I hold in my possession a letter from one of our leading iron-manufacturers in this country, who, in response to an appeal for participation in a charity of this city, gave answer that it had been a practice of the firm to invest a certain portion of their profits in developing the comforts of their workingmen, and that they were obliged to limit their desire to give in charity in order that they might be able to build homes, club-rooms, reading-rooms, and all the _et ceteras_ of a really civilized community in their work-village.

These are examples, in our own country, of what might be done.
One of the most beautiful models that I know of in modern history is furnished by the town to which reference has already been made--the town of Mulhouse, where, after some thirty years, the spirit of brotherliness has so entered into the relationships of capital and labor that a firm would be disreputable which there attempted to carry on business as business is ordinarily done here.

All the manufacturers plan out, organize, and carry on what to most of us would seem impossible schemes for the amelioration and uplifting of the condition of their working people.

No one wonders that, as he walks through the town which his large hearted philanthropy imbued with this fine spirit, the workingmen salute the originator of these schemes as "Father Peter." In addition to this personal, human relationship, capital might and should, in all justice and humanity, identify the pecuniary interests of labor with its own interests.

What is known as industrial partnership is simply a solution of this branch of the problem.


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