Co-operation for Service

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 226, 20 June 1936, Page 18

Co-operation for Service

EFORMERS sometimes demand that industry should become co- | Jp operation for public service instead of competition for private |f\[k profit. That puts It wrong” (says the Archbishop of York, Dr. Temple). “Industry always is co-operation for public service, but we often treat it as if it were competition for private profit. It is cooperation for private service because it can only go on so long as the various factors co-operate. “Capital, management, labour—however you organise them they must all be there; if one of them withdraws its co-operation the process stops. And it is for public service, because if no one wants the goods there will be no purchase money, and again the process cannot go on at all. In order to exist it must be co-operation for service. “That, then, is its essence; and if we will treat something of which that is the essence as if it were competition for private profit, of course it will go wrong, because we are making a mistake. “Personality; fellowship. I will only allude to txio others. Ihe dutj of service arises out of those two. If you must put them together you can t escape it. In every relationship in life in which we find ourselves our duty is to be asking what is the service I can render through the opportunities afforded by this position? "Can it be said that most of our business is conducted by that principle? A great deal, yes; there is a spirit of service both toward the community and toward workpeople. Among workpeople themselves there is also often a great spirit of service, both to the firm or company and to the community, and. above all. to their fellow-workers. “Yet there can be no doubt that the Christian’s duty in every situation of life is to ask how, here, can I render service. And that leads on to a fourth and conspicuously Christian principle—the power of sacrifice. I am quite sure that a reading of English history-T have not tested this elsewhere

—through the nineteenth century leads to this result: No social progress has been accomplished through action on the part of labour making itself a nuisance. . “Where strikes have been successful in achieving a measure of progress, it has been because the sacrifice endured has called vivid attention to a real grievance and has stirred the conscience of the whole community; where real progress has come, it has always been because there has been a new moral awakening, caused, not only’ by the trouble which the strikers have inflicted on their neighbours, but by the courage with which they have endured privation for the sake of what seemed to them a just cause. “Put that on the one side, and on the other side that it may be—none of us can ever say’ when this is so for another —the duty of those who have opportunities of amassing wealth to forgo those opportunities and even perhaps to face actual loss amounting to ruin in business for the sake of adherence to principle and witness to it. “This would not always bo right, because it must involve great suffering for many of the adherents and not only for the individual so acting, but, where such a step could rightly be taken, the witness of it would be more effective than any amount of preaching in winning recognition for the principle. “Well, these, then, are some of the principles which we should urge, as I think, that all our folk and we ourselves should constantly’ have in mind in face of social and industrial evils. Wo cannot claim that those evils are no concern of ourselves, because they touch character, and character is our field. “It is no business of ours to say precisely how they can be remedied: but it is the business of the Church to say that whatever departs from these principles is so far an evil that It must be cured by a fuller application of those principles, and that those who have the requisite knowledge and ex-vAj-jencn are called upon in the name of Christ to use their opportunity as mvisfinns in the nosition where they are placed to that end.