Transpor 
 
 The Place of Industry 
 in Modern Life 
 
 The Founder’s Day Address 
 at the 
 
 University of Virginia 
 April 13, 1915 
 
 By 
 
 FAIRFAX HARRISON 
 
 President, Southern Railway Company 
 
 r Gen. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 
 https://archive.org/details/placeofindustryi00harr_1 
 
16 1932 
 
 THE PLACE OF INDUSTRY IN MODERN LIFE. 
 
 At the Paris Exposition of 1855 there were honourably inscribed on 
 the buildings the names of men who had distinguished themselves not 
 only in science but in industry. It was deemed a fit acknowledgment 
 of the modern world to the place which industry has taken in it. There 
 arose, however, a powerful voice of protest, that of Ernest Renan. “The 
 mistake lies,” he said, “not in proclaiming industry to be excellent and 
 useful, but in exalting it beyond measure and in attaching too much 
 importance to perfecting its processes. * * * The useful does not 
 
 ennoble: that only ennobles which presupposes in man intellectual or 
 moral worth. Virtue, genius, science when it is disinterested, and its 
 only object is to satisfy the desire which leads man to penetrate the 
 enigmas of the universe, military valour, holiness, all those things which 
 correspond with the moral, intellectual or aesthetic needs of man, all these 
 can ennoble. * * * But what is merely useful will never ennoble. 
 
 * * * Industry renders immense services to society but they are serv- 
 
 ices which after all are repaid in money. To every one his own reward: 
 to the man whose usefulness is of the earth earthy, wealth, happiness 
 in the earthly meaning of the word, all earthly blessings; to genius, to 
 virtue, to glory — nobleness.” 
 
 This is an eloquent echo of the judgment upon industry which had 
 been entertained by the Greeks, which has persisted through the ages, 
 which found expression in the Eighteenth Century sneer at England as 
 a “nation of shop-keepers,” which we here in Virginia have exemplified 
 in the opinion surviving even to this generation in rare back-waters of 
 inheritance that it “ill becomes a gentleman to engage in trade.” With 
 the Greeks, as with our immediate forbears, many of the manifestations 
 of industry wore a purely servile guise and were contemned as such, but 
 modern civilization has the added burden of medieval feudalism per- 
 sisting in its prejudices. When the sole discipline of civilization was 
 direct force the highest achievement of a man of generous birth was in 
 feats of arms, or in that mimic of warfare, the chace, and in such a 
 society a contempt for the slow and painful production of the necessaries 
 
2 
 
 of civilization was a test of breeding. It is only in the present genera- 
 tion that we have seen a ruling class holding to the old traditions and yet 
 sufficiently enlightened to appreciate that defensible political power must 
 be built on a foundation of productive efficiency even if it is to be de- 
 fended by destructive energy. I refer to modem Germany. In his soul 
 despising the tradesman and the manufacturer, the junker has still had 
 the wisdom to conceal his prejudice in order to promote his own oppor- 
 tunity for world-power on the shoulders of a wealth-producing popula- 
 tion. In very truth the might of modern Germany, which in demonstra- 
 tion has made the whole world gasp when once its ruling class reverted 
 to force, rests like the untried but well recognized might of the United 
 States of today, not upon a sovereignty of political acumen, not upon the 
 wisdom of its intellectuals — make as they may their Aufruf an die Kul- 
 turwelt — not upon the play of artists upon the human soul, not even 
 upon the genius of nationality, but upon the persistent unwearied accu- 
 mulations of its organized artisans who are ever adding to the human 
 store, in the field, in the mine, in the shop, or wherever else Industry- 
 flies its winding black flag. 
 
 But whatever may be the case of Germany, the United States, 
 given over as it is to industrialism, is not consciously engaged in 
 production merely for the sake of building power, nor even merely 
 for the sake of money. We are a people steeped in idealism, 
 crude as yet in the expression of it perhaps, with a strong appetite for 
 emotional sensation maybe, but surely one who recognizes the motive 
 force of some of our most recent acts of foreign policy must acknowl- 
 edge that it was the most intense idealism which stirred the American 
 people to go to war with Spain to “free” Cuba and thereby to assume 
 heavy, new and undesired responsibilities ; which prescribed a national 
 standard of dealing with the still politically inept peoples of the 
 Philippines as our ancestors demanded that the mother country should 
 deal with the colonists of her own blood and political traditions; which 
 treats with the partizan bandits of Mexico as though they were leaders 
 of a free and self-governing people, These are policies which amaze 
 
3 
 
 the practical statesmen of the elder world, and yet those statesmen 
 would fain persuade themselves that our industrialism has made of us 
 hierophants of a sordid cult of the almighty dollar. Nor do we confine 
 our idealism to foreign relations. If we were in fact merely venal in our 
 industrialism we would doubtless shape our internal political policy to the 
 practical and successful support of industry and not be adding year after 
 year to the cost of production by legislation intended to promote the 
 interest of the employee at the expense of the employer, but which in 
 fact, except in the case of a single important industry, results usually in 
 imposing upon the domestic consumer the added cost of our social serv- 
 ice. If the consumer is not himself an employee he must be an idealist 
 to assume without protest the additional cost of living which is involved 
 in paying more for what one needs that it would cost if one was not of 
 the increasing tribe of Abou ben Adhem. We are, indeed, a nation of 
 idealists in national policy, internal as well as external. 
 
 Claiming, then, these expressions of our political policy as charac- 
 teristic of our genius as a people, it is not too much to ask those who 
 have not had contact with the actual leaders of American industry, nor 
 first-hand appreciation of their motives and their problems, to accept 
 as a fact that many of those men have in aspiration spiritual as well as 
 sordid rewards and that their energy finds what is perhaps its most 
 positive and satisfying expression in attaining that ideal of Industry 
 which has ever been one of the chief ends of civilization, to wit: the con- 
 quest of Nature, bending her neck to the uses of man. In such a place 
 as this in which I now stand it may fortify this assertion that I am able 
 to say that I have seldom associated with an American of the true breed 
 engaged in industry who has not been capable of thrilling to the prophecy 
 of his own experience in the great chorus in the Antigone, which limns 
 a deathless picture of the daring and moral victory of man in his con- 
 test with Nature. 
 
 It is not necessary to rehearse to a generation which has just wit- 
 nessed the extension of the human voice across a continent the things 
 which American industry has conceived and accomplished for civiliza- 
 
4 
 
 tion. The future archeologist, coming upon the foundations of long 
 extinct by-product plants and once noisy railway terminals which had been 
 exterminated by some mysterious and forgotten economic catastrophe, 
 may remark, as Darwin did of the geological traces of the animal 
 monsters which once swarmed in America, that, if Buffon had known 
 of the lost Pachydermata of this continent, he might have said with a 
 greater semblance of truth that the creative force of America had lost 
 its power rather than that it had never possessed great vigor. 
 
 Industry is, then, not necessarily mere money grubbing. With all its 
 stimulus to selfishness and for all that it has grown out of that system of 
 individualism which our ancestors lauded and some among us are now be- 
 ginning to apologize for, industry is daily becoming more responsive to 
 those moral and intellectual needs of man which Renan admits are enno- 
 bling. Men who conduct the destinies of great and conspicuous industries, 
 which affect the public interest immediately, are no longer cynical of 
 their responsibilities. More and more they recognize that they are sub- 
 ject to the control of public opinion almost as much as if they held 
 public political office : that they must account for their stewardship not 
 merely in the private chamber of a Board of Directors, but before the 
 bar of the world. No private interest can today long sustain such men 
 in their positions of power if once public opinion shall discover and pro- 
 claim that they lack character; and they know it. While the awakened 
 public consciousness of a general interest in the conduct of our most 
 important industries, and the measures of prohibition and police in which 
 that public consciousness has found expression, have undoubtedly stim- 
 ulated the changes which have taken place in the attitude of industry 
 itself, it is fair to recognize that industrial leaders have themselves felt 
 the stirring of the times and in notable instances have made contribu- 
 tions to the solution of the problems which still overshadow all industry, 
 namely: those of the relations of labour and capital, and of the private 
 ownership of public utilities. Such things have been done as to justify 
 for those men the claim of statesmanship. In making this claim one need 
 not be ashamed to admit that Industry has not yet submitted to all the 
 
5 
 
 mollifying influences of the professional social democrats. It has frankly 
 and openly combatted, as inimical to efficiency, the growth of an opinion 
 that all power except political power is a menace. This opinion is the 
 child of fat years of plenty and prosperity. Goethe knew the sentiment 
 which is back of it and photographed it subtly in a memorable passage of 
 the Dictung und Warheit. “In peace,” he says, “man’s love of freedom 
 becomes more and more prominent, and the more free one is the more 
 free one wishes to be. We will not tolerate anything over us. We will 
 not be restrained. No one shall be restrained. This tender, nay morbid, 
 feeling gives rise to a certain moral feud which with laudable beginnings 
 leads to inevitably unfortunate results, though at its best it appears in 
 noble souls under the form of justice.” 
 
 The modern world, realizing more personal freedom than Goethe ever 
 dreamed of, has undoubtedly pushed this sentiment beyond the demand 
 of justice, for, as another profound and stimulating German philosopher 
 of our own generation has pointed out, the inclination now is not only to 
 take up responsibility for the weaker, which is undeniably right and 
 noble, but to place ourselves as far as possible in their position and to 
 arrange the whole of life in their interest. “It seems to be now believed,” 
 says Eucken, “that the weak are good and the strong bad, and that it is 
 the duty of the latter to give way to the former the moment there is a 
 conflict of interests. This shows itself in a public tendency to take sides 
 with the child against the parent, with the pupil against the teacher, and 
 in general with those in subordination against those in authority, as if all 
 order and discipline were a mere demonstration of selfishness and 
 brutality.” 
 
 It must be admitted that the recent history of industry has presented 
 some sharp contrasts to the ideal of those who entertain this sentiment. 
 After a long generation of surcease from serious war men have found 
 in industry opportunities to satisfy some of the more primeval appetites, 
 conspicuously that implanted in the breast of every virile man — the love 
 of conflict and of power won by conquest. 
 
 Lacking heroes of military fame, we have heard men of action- 
 
6 
 
 who bear scars of achievement, acclaimed by the sonorous designation of 
 “Captain of Industry,” or, somewhat later in the suggestion of the 
 statesman who would shape to his principles a stiff-necked and untoward 
 generation, by a more orotund title, “Master of Competitive Supremacy.” 
 We have seen triumphant Democracy in fierce grapple with such men. 
 We have heard their activities denounced as fraught with political and 
 social evil, but, even when, as the result of changed standards of political 
 philosophy, they have been convicted of statutory crimes against the 
 common weal, all men knew that they were actuated by no merely vulgar 
 greed but by love of work and of power, by a Berserker lust for fight, 
 and that they usually lived their lives in action to the end, without sparing 
 themselves to indulge in rest and sordid ostentation. Such men, though 
 they made their careers in industry, seldom knew “happiness in the 
 earthly meaning of the word” ; they were not content with the reward of 
 money alone, as Renan proposed, but took it and used it as the badge of 
 their achievement. The American people saw this, and secretly admiring 
 their Satanic wickedness have uniformly declined to submit them to de- 
 grading personal punishments, while, with that resignation human nature 
 always has in the curbing of the haughty, they have approved the slow 
 and certain measures of the law which painfully and in travail tear down 
 the monuments these men set up suddenly in fierce victory. It is never 
 displeasing to the average man to chant with David : “How are the 
 mighty fallen !” 
 
 The sentiment of work for the sake of work and the achievements 
 which come of work permeates the whole polity of our industrial life : it is 
 happily as evident in the less conspicuous records of the superintendent 
 and the resident engineer as in the red annals of the trust builder : indeed, 
 those modest men who organize and administer working human units, 
 whose experienced skill often devises the ways, if not the means, to accom- 
 plish the tasks of industry, are the true captains of the modern world. 
 They are loyal soldiers of civilization deserving as much honour as ever 
 was won upon a tented field, and yet, in the organization of society today, 
 they are classed loosely with the politically dangerous, as servants of 
 
7 
 
 incorporate Industry. Deprived of the sympathy which society gives to 
 those under their command, deprived by the very exactions of their duties 
 from seeking their own fortunes, earning many-fold their usually slender 
 salaries, they are as a class as honest as their lives are simple, ever ready 
 to do and dare without conscious stint, attesting daily in their pride of 
 accomplishment a mute answer to Hamlet’s question: “Who would fardels 
 bear?”, and realizing honourably in their response to the calls of their 
 superiors Ruskin’s fine invocation of their class : 
 
 “To obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to 
 him and to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of 
 liberty, liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he 
 goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has in most cases 
 more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. 
 The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoul- 
 der, of the other by the bridle on his lips : there is no way by which 
 the burden may be lightened, but we need not suffer from the bridle 
 if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold 
 ourselves and our likes at his disposal, is not slavery: often it is the 
 noblest state in which a man can live in this world.” 
 
 Let this, then, be the answer to Ernest Renan. 
 
 Industry in the sense I have used the word, connoting organized 
 productive labour, is one of the enlarging concepts of the modern world. 
 It is so new a thing that it finds no definition in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. 
 Mr. Jefferson had in his old age a vision of it. He saw more that it was 
 inevitable than in his opinion desirable. While he never altogether yielded 
 his darling theory that the United States should in its own interest re- 
 main a purely agricultural nation, aloof from the competitive commerce 
 of the world — that tenet which had drawn upon him throughout his 
 career the hatred and recrimination of New England — yet in 1816 he 
 confessed that experience had taught him that domestic manufactures 
 were necessary to happiness and comfort. 
 
 The fact is that industrialism began, long before it had a name, with 
 
8 
 
 the decay of direct force as the basis of social discipline and the substi- 
 tution of the granting or refusal of work as the main preventive and co- 
 ercive power of civilization. This was an extraordinary, an almost 
 incomprehensible change. Well may Comte exclaim that “considering 
 the natural indolence of the human constitution, it could hardly have been 
 foreseen that the prevailing desire of the majority of free men would 
 be for permanent work.” 
 
 With Comte’s statement of the phenomenon we may accept also his 
 explanation. “Industrial pursuit,” he says, “is suitable to the intellectual 
 mediocrity of the vast majority of the race which can best deal with 
 clear, concrete, limited questions requiring steady but easy attention, ad- 
 mitting of a direct or proximate solution, relating to the practical inter- 
 ests of civilized life and bringing after them a pretty certain reward of 
 ease and independence in return for sense and industry.” 
 
 We have here, then, an appreciation that industry in the modern 
 sense was not a concept of statesmanship but arose from below, and this 
 fact, coupled with the prejudice of the cavalier class against participation 
 in all productive labour to which I have referred, may serve to explain 
 why until very recently industry, having become the great force of the 
 modern world, has drawn into its ranks so few educated men, why 
 college training has so seldom been deemed a propaedeutic for industry. 
 The typical successful American engaged in industry has been the self- 
 made man, educated, as he proudly tells you, in the school of experience, 
 and the majority of the shining exemplars are so today. All honour 
 is due them and is paid to them for that reason : but their example, 
 leading many to the belief that education is not necessary for business, 
 had an undue influence upon their generation. This largely accounts for 
 the passing of the roundly educated man which has been one of the re- 
 gretable facts of recent American social history, like that of our van- 
 ishing wild life. 
 
 Unless one is prepared to claim that a college education is 
 a handicap in industry : that the needed equipment for dealing with 
 the largest social and economic questions of the day is a mere blend of 
 
9 
 
 empiricism and native common sense, then the time has certainly come 
 when more young men of tradition and broad education are needed in 
 industry, to be preparing to take the leadership in the next generation, 
 when the moral responsibilities of such leadership are certain to be 
 greater even than they are today. 
 
 Happily one may now say that the movement for the con- 
 servation of educated men in business has almost become a ten- 
 dency. Already one sees every year more and more young men 
 of the class to which I refer seeking a career in industry. It began 
 with the demand for men trained in Science. The editor of the English 
 periodical Nature truly said the other day that “Science is the 
 dynamic and creative force in industry, and it is only through scientific 
 discovery that industry can rapidly advance.” The man engaged in 
 industry who could underrate his debt to science would, like Sydney 
 Smith’s friend, “speak disrespectfully of the Equator.” Especially do I 
 lay the tribute of my profound admiration and grateful respect at the feet 
 of him who makes a career in the domain of pure science. Even though 
 from the very nature of his work — those tranquil but arduous pursuits 
 for which Mr. Jefferson avowed Nature intended him — the scientist can 
 not often be one of an active industrial staff which must struggle and 
 compete in the hurly burly, yet the actual and potential value of the 
 scientist’s contribution to industry is greater than has ever yet been gen- 
 erally acknowledged in America. As to what this contribution is, it will 
 suffice to cite the justly proud claim recently put forward on behalf of 
 the chemists, that chemical control of manufacturing practice has given 
 the assurance of stability to thirteen great American industries which 
 together employ eight per cent of all the wage earners engaged in manu- 
 facturing in the United States. The proof of this statement is a monu- 
 ment of patriotism, aere perennius. 
 
 It must, however, be stated that many of the men who are now 
 trained in technical science for the uses of industry come into action with 
 but a narrow vision, the result of over-specialization and an apparent 
 atrophy of the power of effective generalization. My point can perhaps 
 
10 
 
 best be suggested by calling attention to the fact that proportionately 
 few of the thousands of men who now for almost a generation have gone 
 forth from our colleges into the world with a special equipment in tech- 
 nical science have attained to supreme leadership in industry, though 
 many of them are employed in industry in subordinate capacities. In 
 making this statement I am not unmindful of the conspicuous exceptions, 
 chiefly in the ranks of the engineers and metallurgists. The immediate 
 advantage of a special equipment is great in that it enables a man to 
 arrive at economic independence earlier than his untrained fellows, but 
 I sometimes question whether he does not pay too high a price for that 
 desideratum, and whether the lack of a broader training in such men 
 does not deprive the country of some potential leaders in industry. We 
 need such men as we get, they do their assigned work honestly and 
 efficiently, but we need more the qualities of leadership which are more 
 generally bred by what is called cultural education. 
 
 It must be recognized also that the influence of cultural education as 
 we have had it has not yet been directly favourable to industry, though, 
 as I shall attempt to show, it is indirectly favourable. The colleges of a 
 generation ago still shut out the bright light of social evolution from 
 their cloisters. They held that learning was valuable in itself and not 
 necessarily in proportion as one could make use of it. Without pausing 
 to discuss the fact that in the revolution of this opinion it is now proposed 
 that the learning imparted in the colleges shall consist entirely of the 
 vocationally useful, so that we are threatened with a new educational 
 opinion fraught with as much exaggeration as was the old (illustrating 
 the working of that despotism which John Stuart Mill feared in all pro- 
 posals for general State education as a mere contrivance for moulding 
 people to be exactly like one another), I pass on to the effect of the old 
 scholasticism upon the youth of today, which I believe is turning more 
 and more of our most desirable young men towards an industrial career. 
 I venture to adopt here a lucid statement by a modern English scholar, 
 and an eminent classical scholar at that: 
 
11 
 
 “It is against preponderant intellectualism with its attendant ego- 
 tism that the present generation instinctively reacts, Amazingly clever 
 though it is, it has felt itself somehow sterile in motive power. It 
 desires to feel afresh, even that it may think anew. It asks to be 
 born again. I do not know whether I am singular in my experience, 
 but what has most impressed me in the young is their extreme old 
 age, their hoary wisdom. The youth of the past was in love with 
 ideas, drunk with ideals, avid of analysis : the youth of today sees 
 life steadily and sees it whole. Above all it craves for action and 
 only for such thinking as is immediately translatable into action.” 
 
 It is in truth action which the youth of today craves. As he comes 
 out of college, where can he find action? Not, like Gibbon, in past 
 history, but in making history. The tradition of the young Southern 
 man has always suggested politics as the highest expression of intelligent 
 action. From the day when every man who could wear spurs was a 
 soldier until we enter the latest world, the premier place in a gentleman's 
 ambition has been supremacy in the artistry of political government, but 
 with the realization of democracy we have seen that ambition decay in 
 many generous breasts, though, due to our peculiar civilization, it has 
 persisted longest with the Southern man. Under democracy the politician 
 exercises only the forms of power. He may grimace his own emo- 
 tions but it must be behind a mask of convention, like a Greek player. 
 Time was when the productive population was the slave of the political 
 governor; time is when the politician has become the slave of the great 
 god Demos ; the positions are reversed ; the Industrial Revolution has 
 shifted the roles of Caliban and Ariel. Lacking politics, the trend of the 
 college environment has been toward the traditional careers in the so- 
 called learned professions. The greatest of these, measured by its attrac- 
 tion, the law, has held its place by adapting itself to changed conditions : 
 it is honoured as it always was, but the lawyer labours now in the service 
 not of princes and of governors, but to guide through pathless forests the 
 policy of incarnate Industry. It is coming to pass that a youth looking 
 out on life sees this and determines, if he may have the election, he 
 would rather be the man who does things than the man who advises the 
 
12 
 
 man who does things, and that is the election for industry in preference 
 to the law. 
 
 Such men are welcome in industry and when they have the qualifi- 
 cations for success may count on such success as is attainable in industry 
 today. They may not expect a primrose path. The apprenticeship is 
 long, exacting and frugal, and in the present state of public opinion with 
 respect to corporate enterprise, diligence, like that of the Good Apprentice 
 in Hogarth’s pictures, is not rewarded by the assurance of ultimate af- 
 fluence and universal respect. If they want to make a fortune these men 
 had better turn at once to selling merchandise. They may not expect 
 always to live and to work in the comfortable places of the earth. They 
 must associate chiefly with men with whom they may have the largest 
 human but small intellectual sympathy. As they rise to places of author- 
 ity they may expect not only to have to do their duty under serious public 
 difficulty but to have their most sincere motives misunderstood and tra- 
 duced. They must be ready always to take the consequences of saying no. 
 “Patriots,” said the experienced Sir Robert Walpole, “are easily raised. 
 I have myself raised many a one. ’Tis but to refuse an unreasonable 
 request and up springs a patriot.” They must bear heavy responsibility 
 without sympathy and realize that failure is a crime for which good in- 
 tention is seldom an acceptable excuse. They will find, as Cardinal New- 
 man did, that men are influenced more by type of personality than by 
 argument, however logical ; that the loyalty of General Lee’s army was 
 due more to that indefinable personal attribute which makes a leader 
 than to any thing intellectual: that Southern men can be led any where 
 but are driven only by superior force. They will find that much of their 
 work will be in an atmosphere of unreasoning prejudice. They will 
 encounter much meanness in human nature and some injustice: but if 
 they persist and hold hard to their ideals and do succeed they will know 
 the greatest of all satisfactions, the consciousness of work well done. 
 They will know, too, that that work has not been in the closet, has not 
 been theoretical and indirect in its effect, but positive and part of the 
 motive power of the age : and so, in proportion as it is sincere and en- 
 
13 
 
 lightened and progressive, useful and noble in the highest sense. They 
 will know that they have been producers, adding to the economic store 
 of humanity, shaping directly the welfare of thousands of their fellow 
 men who are struggling upward : that they have been leaders of society 
 and not its mere servants who live by their wits upon the needs or the 
 pleasures of the workers. They may not achieve the laurel crown of 
 fame and write their names large on the enduring page of history, but 
 they will have made the kind of friends who are made only among 
 those with whom one has shared tribulations, dangers, triumphs and 
 escapes. They will have few illusions, but deep convictions. They will 
 have given the world more than they have taken from it, but they will 
 have taken and held some thing which is supreme in the heart of man. 
 When Alexander the Great was asked what he reserved for himself, so 
 liberal were his gifts, he said: “Hope, that is the true inheritance of 
 all that resolve upon great enterprises.” 
 
 No one could express more convincingly the sentiment of progress, 
 and progress is the ideal of American industry. 
 
 The place of Industry in modern life can, then, be made as honourable 
 as it is beyond all peradventure supremely useful. It is worth the best a 
 man can give who would serve his age and leave to his children an inspi- 
 ration in his career.