To the growing movement for city planning should be added an equal movement for country planning; and these should not proceed separately, but both together. No other public program is now more needed.
There is still another application of this problem of the land background. It is the influence that productive ownership exerts on the day's work.
Yesterday for some time I observed eight working men engaged in removing parts of a structure and loading the pieces on a freight-car. At no time were more than two of the men making any pretension of working at once, most of the time they were all visiting or watching passers-by, and in the whole period the eight men did not accomplish what one good honest man should have performed. I wondered whether they had sufficient exercise to keep them in good health. They apparently were concerned about their "rights"; if the employer had rights they were undiscoverable.
We know the integrity and effectiveness of the body of workmen; yet any reader who has formed a habit of observing men on day work and public work will recognize my account. Day men usually work in gangs, frequently too many of them to allow any one to labor effectively, and the whole process is likely to be mechanical, impersonal, often shiftless and pervaded with the highly developed skill of putting in the time and reducing the time to the minimum and of beginning to quit well in advance of the quitting time. The process of securing labor has become involved, tied up, and the labor is not rendered in a sufficient spirit of service. About the only free labor yet remaining to us is the month labor on the farm, even though it may be difficult to secure and be comprised largely of ineffective remainders.
Over against all this is the importance of setting men at work singly and for themselves; this can be accomplished only when they own their property or have some real personal share in the production. The gang-spirit of labor runs into the politics of the group and constitutes the norm. If we are to have self-acting men they must be removed from close control, in labor as well as elsewhere. If it is necessary that any great proportion of the laboring men shall be controlled, then is it equally important that other men in sufficient numbers shall constitute the requisite counterbalance and corrective. It is doubtful whether any kind of profit-sharing in closely controlled industries can ever be as effective in training responsible men for a democracy, other things being equal, as an occupation or series of occupations in which the worker is responsible for his own results rather than to an overseer, although the profit-sharing may for the time being develop the greater technical efficiency.