“CHANGE OF HEART”

Waikato Times, Volume 193, Issue 22204, 25 November 1943, Page 7

“CHANGE OF HEART”

| INDUSTRIALISTS' CHIEF NEED I IMPROVEMENT IN RELATIONS j ‘‘l was very interested to see the j industrial relationships scheme which you had worked out for your approach to all the Rotary Clubs in the Dominion, and I shall be still more interested to know what was the result,” states a letter received by Mr H. Valder, of Hamilton, from the general manager of one of the largest motor-car manufactories in England, new making munitions and employing nearly 20,000 workers. "I must confess,” the letter continues, “that I have some doubts about the effectiveness of the scheme if I were asked to visualise it in English circles, for I am afraid that the very mixed interests which are represented by any gathering of business folk does represent in England a very serious obstacle and handicap. What is obviously required is some change of heart, or clarification of purpose, and ‘Service before self’ does not always mean in practice what it seems to suggest in principle. So long as we do so much worship of money itself, and so long as we instinctively honour those who have made themselves a good ‘pile,’ so long, it is clear, a very big change of heart is indeed still needed. Need Recognised

“But I have great hopes that this change of heart is coming steadily, although, with perhaps a little cynicism, I do not believe it is coming from a desire to have a heart change of itself alone. lam beginning to think that there is more progress being made along the lines of realising that a more efficient form of operation in industry is essential to the maintenance of a better standard of living, and that there is going to be greater propulsion from this thought than there will be from the perhaps higher one of striving to improve men’s altruistic feelings.

“I should be inclined to doubt, for instance, how the London Rotary

Club would react to any new order which seriously changed the present basic of things—although I may be doing them an injustice and my more sweeping statement is not true in individual cases. “Many men are beginning to take the line that this economic blundering and its social consequences cannot possibly go on, and are groping around for some cleaner form of industrial operation, which will give some opportunity for the best thoughts in us to come out, instead of following some scheme where individualism is a god and selfishness a creed.”