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object-lessons in social sanity. I have not heard him telling how to organize Kingdom Come out of people of doubtful qualifications for free citizenship anywhere. He can tell us, however, how he made discoveries about his own business, that have helped his own policies, and have tended to raise the gen- eral level of business morality. I would name the firm of Procter & Gamble and the National Cash Register Co. as good examples of social sanity. Such concerns as these have tried thoroughly commendable experiments within the range of possibility in their own business. They have contributed more to a final solu- tion of the labor problem than all the visionaries who offer senti- ment as equivalent for discovery, and rhetoric as substitute for experience.
The obstinate fact is that nobody in the world is wise enough to convince a majority in any nation today that he has a work- able solution of the labor problem. Sanity in social agitation will accordingly tone down its style of assertion in candid recog- nition of this fact. It is either insane or dishonest to talk as though wide-reaching social reforms, such as a permanent solu- tion of the labor problem, have been thought through, and could be brought about forthwith, if we would only say so. No well- informed and well-balanced person will assert or imply that the way to accomplish such a reform has been discovered.
On the other hand, a hundred minor plans and policies have been discovered, which make for partial solution of the labor problem. A hundred means are known, applicable at different points of the industrial system, under different circumstances, in different conditions. For instance, no one can read the two latest books of Sidney and Beatrice Webb without the conviction that the possibilities of labor organization are hardly yet imagined. In America we are at least a generation behind England in the maturity of trade-unionism. Again, the insurance principle, as a factor of mighty possibilities in future developments of the problem, has hardly yet touched the imagination of reformers. I do not mean mere life insurance, or old-age, or accident, or loss-of-employment insurance alone. I mean the extension of the insurance principle as widely as the organization of labor can
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