CHAPTER III
ADAPTING PEOPLE TO INDUSTRY--THE GERMAN WAY
Statemanship in Germany covered "industrial strategy" as well as
political. Its labor protection and regulations were in line with its
imperial policy of domination. Within recent years labor protection
from the point of view of statesmanship has been urged in England and
America. The waste of life is a matter of unconcern in the United
States so long as private business can replenish its labor without
seriously depleting the oversupply. It becomes a matter of concern
only when there are no workers waiting for employment. The German
state has regulated the conditions of labor and conserved human energy
because its purpose has been not the short-lived one of private
business, but the long-lived one of imperial competition. It was the
policy of the Prussian state to conserve human energy for the strength
and the enrichment of the Empire. Whatever was good for the Empire was
good, it was assumed, for the people. The humanitarians in the United
States who tried to introduce labor legislation in their own country
accepted this naive philosophy of the German people, which had been so
skilfully developed by Prussian statesmen, without appreciating that
its result was enervating. Our prevailing political philosophy,
however, that workers and capitalists understand their own interests
and are more capable than the state of looking after them, stood in
the way of adopting on grounds of statesmanship the German methods.
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