In an article in Scribner’s Magazine, Mr A. A. Berle, jun., one of President Roosevelt’s advisers, writes: “in industry we know, now, that the worker is quite as important 'as a consuming and living being as he is as a producer; for wc can produce with considerable ease, while consumption as wc know it to-day has to be w roi.ght out of the whole art of living. The business of to-day is not an affair of making profits. That is incidental. Business is the service of supply. it aims to provide goods and service sufficient to allow people to live, to develop, and to live still more fully. When it decs not do this, business is bankrupt. It is bankrupt morally in the first place, and it is bankrupt financially shortly thereafter. So much we have learned. Consequently, the directive in every case must he the pacing of individuals in a position where they can live freely, fully, 'and well. Only as they live freely, and fully, and well, can business exist at
all. In meeting a u economic crisis, we all of us have voluntarily ceded some part of our liberty of action. But in that sacrifice we have perhaps found some part of a freedom of soul wide!) we. had lost, if life were nothing mere than working and eating and sleeping and dying, thws tremendous fabric would be meaningless indeed. The great justification for living is that life is a conduit of civilisation ; the great joy of life is to add some slight part to that civilisation through personal fulfilment. The great faith of life is that through our very dffieultics and in our efforts we deepen the stream and enlarge the scope of the spiritual life of the country. Without this faith, life becomes so uninteresting as hardly to be wert-h The economic structure is merely a means to this end; unless it is shot, though with this motivation which builds on it, pervades it, uses it, the system lias become sterile an dits activities have become habits rather than useful processes.”
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Hokitika Guardian, 12 October 1933, Page 4
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346Untitled Hokitika Guardian, 12 October 1933, Page 4
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