ACCEPTANCE OF NEW THEORY 123

which they may work with zest and spirit and pride of
accomplishment. When zest departs, labor becomes drudgery.
When exhaustion enters, labor becomes slavery. Zest is
partly a matter of physical condition, but it is also largely
influenced by mental reactions. These are common to all of
us in every position. Are we doing well with our lives?
Are we providing for our families—not merely clothes and
food and shelter while we are working, but an insurance for
them when our working time is ended either by age, disability,
 or death? Are we providing more cultural opportunities
 for ourselves and our children? In a word, are we
free men? Here in America, we have raised the standard
of political equality. Shall we be able to add to that, full
equality in economic opportunity? No man is wholly free
until he is both politically and economically free. No man
with an uneconomic and failing business is free. He is
unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society, and
to himself. No man with an inadequate wage is free. He
is unable to meet his obligations to his family, to society and
to himself. No man is free who can provide only for physical
needs. He must also be in a position to take advantage of
cultural opportunities. Business, as the process of coordinating
 men’s capital and effort in all fields of activity, will
not have accomplished its full service until it shall have provided
 the opportunity for all men to be economically free.
[ have referred elsewhere to the cultural wage. I repeat it
here as an appropriate term with which to measure the right
earnings of every member of a sound society competent and
willing to work. ... The worker must be made to feel,
must be made to realize, that he is a property owner. General
Electric is operating, in a modest measure, along these lines
now. A consciousness of independence must be created—at
least a feeling on the part of the man, that he is working
toward complete independence, and that what he gets in the
world he earns—it is not handed out to him as pap.
Not merely a living wage, but a cultural wage, must be the
basis for the solving of the economic system of to-morrow.