Prayer in Industry

Just a month ago John Emmett Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers,* addressed the third quadrennial Conference on the Economic Order, conducted at Evanston, Ill. by the Methodist Federation for Social Service. The general subject was "The Layman and the Economic Order."/- The religious as well as the daily Press paid little attention to the meeting. It seemed purely a Methodist talk fest. Last fortnight, however. The Nation discovered a paragraph in Mr. Edgerton's paper which Methodist publications seem to have ignored.

The paragraph: "I am proud to say that the morning-prayer exercises in my factory have had the finest economic effect. Workers are producing far more goods than before the prayer system was started some years ago. We have made it almost impossible for anyone but a Christian to get a job. We examine applicants for work to see if they have any dangerous ideas. We have been able by that process to keep our plant free of trouble."

Comment by The Nation: "Mr. Edgerton's prayer system will undoubtedly spread, as it certainly deserves to, in the present 'inevitable period' of unemployment. In these recent materialistic years the workers have suffered from the scourge of work without faith. If prayer has aided production as much as Mr. Edgerton indicates, we see no reason whatever why with proper faith it should not prove equally effective as an entire substitute for production in difficult times like the present. It is high time in any case that the work ers learned to live by faith, not work. As for those weaklings who may fall by the wayside and starve to death, let the country bury them under the epitaph: Better Dead than Red."

Further excerpts from Mr. Edgerton's speech:

"We have become too much concerned with the rights of men and too little with their obligations. . . .

"There is simply too much talk about rights and leisure, living wages, rewards . . . and too little about the obligation to work and to earn the things men need and will enjoy. It has actually come to pass that work is being generally regarded as a curse sent upon man rather than as a privilege and a duty. A certain portion of the citizenship has been counted off into a class called 'workers,' who are being made to believe, through much talking about them and their particular rights, that all other people are loafers and parasites. We have established a legal holiday known as 'Labor Day,' and have imparted to it a significance which I believe tends to increase and intensify class consciousness. On this day no one is accorded the right to march in a parade except those who enjoy the distinction of being 'workers,' as opposed presumably to 'nonworkers' All of this, in my opinion, impedes the spirit of brotherhood among all people, and is contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ. . . .

"But I believe in justice to him who hath as much as to him who hath not, and I think envy is as great a sin as greed. . . .

"Of our 120 millions of population, there are fewer than ten millions directly related to that circle of life known as Industry. Yet by far the larger portion of reforming agencies are concentrating upon this minority in our national life when most of the serious problems are outside the circumference of Industry. This is stranger still when it is considered that American industry has made more progress toward perfection in all respects than any other part of our national whole. Our industry is the only thing in which we have achieved pre-eminent distinction. It is the only thing about America that the rest of the world envies."

"Important members of the N. A. M.: General Electric Co., International Harvester Co., Packard Motor Car Co. Mr. Edgerton is also president of the Lebanon (Tenn.) Woolen Mills, trustee of Vanderbilt University, trustee of Martin College (Pulaski, Tenn.), a Democrat, a Kiwanian, a Rotarian, a Southern Methodist.

/-Previous subjects: "Christianity and the Economic Order" (1922), "The Preacher and the Economic Order" (1926).

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