Politics is seldom dull; in Weihsien camp it was never so. From the day we arrived to the end of our stay, the issues of power, law, and government were the most fascinating and baffling that we faced. Day in and day out we were confronted with many problems that most students of society discuss in the abstract. We, however, had to solve them in practice. How do you form a government? How are leaders best picked? Why is democratic rule preferable—if it is? How does a government generate enough power to rule and yet not be allowed too much power lest it become despotic? How is the moral dimension of life interrelated with the role of law and force in human community?

These were the questions that we had to wrestle with daily. It cannot be said that we ever solved any of these problems. For unlike questions of mathematical theory or engineering, political problems, since they are concerned with people and their relationships and not with things, admit of no final solutions. We did, however, learn a lot at first hand about the kinds of issues with which man's political capacities must always deal.

Not every camp faced these peculiarly political problems. Many civilian camps were not allowed such freedom by the Japanese in governing themselves. Although this internal freedom was a great boon to us, it did present us with the problem of generating enough authority among ourselves to govern our little society efficiently.

Ours, as a civilian internment camp, was on this question quite unlike a prisoner-of-war camp. The governmental hierarchy of an army camp is assigned to it at the outset in its clearly delineated military ranks; thus its leaders are determined by the presence of the officer corps. All that is needed to make things run well is the officer's good horse sense and instinct for applying wisely and humanely to a new situation the various set rules of army life. To him belongs the problem of ruling and possibly—when it comes to dealing with the enemy—of diplomacy. But the political problem is not his and never will be while he wears his stripes. As history shows repeatedly, the difference between rule in army life and politics in civilian life is frequently not understood, and even the most successful generals have not always been able to master the art of politics.

The prime concern of politics is not use of power but generation of power, with the achievement and maintenance of authority. The great "political" geniuses also may be able to rule well—as may, indeed, a king or a general. But what makes them so-called "political animals" or "born politicians" is not this capacity to rule, but the ability to draw power to themselves, to assume and keep—by one means or another—the role of leader. This achievement of rule, of legitimate and controlled power, establishes the political problem, both for a man and for a society. This problem must be resolved by every society, if not politically, then by the "man on horseback." Thus democracy and politics, so often set in opposition to one another as ideal vs. sordid reality, work together—or fall together.

Democracy is that structure of social rule in which authority and power are established by none but political means. Here the ordinary citizen—as opposed to the hereditary ruler—draws to himself through persuasion and/or political pressure (not through the use of force) the consent of others that legitimatizes his rule. As every American president knows, the acquisition and retention of power depend on his political acumen, on his capacity to draw to himself without force the power to get done what he has to get done. If he is not equal to this political task, he cannot long rule in a democracy.

Our camp community faced the political problem in its most elemental form. When we arrived, we did not have even the beginnings of a government. Aside from our common Western origins, we could scarcely have been a more heterogeneous crowd. Usually in such inchoate communities, a rough, preliminary rule is established and maintained by those who hold the force of arms. Later, when a common ethos appears, this authority founded on force can be replaced by one based on consent. With us, however, such an early basis for order was impossible. In an internment camp, enemy soldiers hold all the instruments of force. It is they, therefore, not the fledgling government, who preserve order. We soon discovered that such a government as ours, one with responsibility but no visible means of enforcing its authority—much like the problem of the present United Nations —faces a trying and baffling task.

Through this experience I learned several things. First, that any stable government or system of law must seek to guide itself as best it can by the principles of justice and equality. Secondly, that in the last analysis government can rest only on the united moral strength of the community which it governs. But, thirdly, that the capacity to rule is also dependent upon the possession of force. Force must be available in extreme cases to compel compliance to the will of the government and it must be present to punish serious offenders against the community's laws. In the creation of legitimate governmental authority, the interplay between these moral and compulsive elements creates the most fascinating of problems. Morality can never replace force, but it must provide the deep basis for the creative use of force.

The first time I saw clearly the fundamental need for the element of force in any governmental rule was in my experience on the Housing Committee. In order to do our job of making housing more bearable—i.e., in order to achieve more justice—we had to move people around continually. As I have indicated, I at first believed that people would simply move when such an action had been proved "just" to them. After I was disabused of that fantasy, I thought that probably (here possibly memories of school discipline were responsible) people would comply willingly when those in legitimate authority told them to do so. We were the appointed authority. Yet we were invariably told to go mind our own business.

Thus arose for us the problem of power. If the committee is to do what it thinks just, it must be able to get people to comply with its plans. But if people won't be persuaded, and if they can't be compelled, how is the justice to be enacted? For the first time it appeared to me that, contrary to most pacifist and anarchistic theory (to which I had been sympathetic), legitimate force is one of the necessary bases upon which justice can be established in human affairs.

One day after we had been in camp about four months, Mr. Izu casually told us that in ten days' time forty Belgians were coming to the camp and that we were to clear ten rooms for these families at once. We gasped. Having seen how difficult—not to say dangerous—it had been to get more space for our own overcrowded people, how did he expect us to get all those rooms for strangers on such short notice?

"No, matter," shrugged the impassive Izu, "the rooms must be found." With irrefutable logic, he added, "Is it not more just to move other people now than to let the new arrivals sleep out in the cold and wet when they get here?"

He was right: rooms had to be found. This was clearly more important than the delicacy of the way in which they were to be found.

When we scanned our map of the compound, we found only two possibilities. We could move about thirty bachelors out of small rooms into dorms; or we could move about the same number of single women. Since it was clear that families could not be moved into dorms, and since by the same token the Belgian families could not be housed there, this wholesale move of either male or female single people was the only available alternative. But which group should we move?

This was a tormenting question for one intent on doing the "right thing." It was obvious to anyone with a sense of fairness that it would be more just to move the men than the women. The latter were on the whole older, less robust, and they suffered a great deal more from the rigors of camp life. Every humane consideration led us to decide to leave the women alone and to tackle the thirty bachelors. If governments were run solely on moral grounds, this is what we would have done at once. But, as we discovered, they are not; power is also part of the political equation. The question "Can it be done?" is as relevant as the question "Is it right?"

We talked to the men. I was by now not at all surprised that they refused categorically to move out of their single rooms in spite of the fact that they were crowded three to a small space. Rational argument and moral pressure were useless. The men merely found new reasons why it was most just that others be required to move.

"Didn't we send our wives home as the government ordered before the war?" protested one. "Haven't those damn women stayed on in China in spite of the clear command of the Consulate to get out? We had to stay—they didn't. We're not moving for them!"

"But many of these women were secretaries and teachers who were as badly needed here as you executives," I argued.

"That may be, Mac—but we're not moving. And there are thirty of us who will knock the stuffing out of any committee that tries to get us out."

What were we to do? This was no case of individual families too disunited to oppose us. These thirty men were well aware of their strength en masse, and they would fight. How could we get them out? We thought briefly of calling out the guards. But just as quickly we gave that one up. It was too dangerous. A free-for-all with the guards might end anywhere, with someone wounded or even killed. Not unmindful of our own image as well, we knew it would be fatal for any internee to be responsible for bringing the guards into a physical tussle with his mates. Only if we were sure there would be no physical resistance could we consider calling on Japanese power for help.

Frustrated, we went to the Internee Discipline Committee to see what they might be able to do for us. Could they conscript enough men from the camp to go and move those recalcitrant bachelors out?

"Not on your life," said Ian Campbell, the realistic head of discipline. "We would have to get at least fifty to move that crowd. Any group of husky men would sympathize with those bachelors. In fact they would probably help them against you. I have no idea of letting such a fight as that get started here—much less encouraging it. No, brother, the best thing for you to do is to move the gals quietly and forget it."

"But that isn't right!" I exploded. "I'll be damned if I'm going to force those women to move. It's unjust! I know perfectly well it's only because we can't move the men. What will I say to them? How can I convince them it is right, when I know damn well it isn't?"

"Well, then, what's the answer? Are you going to let the Belgians sleep in the cold because you can't get rooms fairly?" asked Campbell with a smile, knowing he had me. "Is that just, letting them suffer—and much more than the single women will—to ease your conscience? No, my advice is go ahead and move them."

I didn't like it a bit, but I had to admit that Campbell was right. In the end I recommended to Shields that we move the women. As always, they were more docile than the men. But we on the committee could hardly rejoice in our action, or even sound convincing to our own ears, when we sought to persuade the skeptical women that moving them was the "right thing to do."

I thought about this case a great deal because it seemed to me both utterly outrageous and vastly significant. Political action did involve compromise. To my surprise, I saw that our action—uncomfortable as it was for everyone—was in fact more moral than if we had taken the less practical idealistic route. For no program in the life of a community is really just if that program cannot be enacted. Ideal solutions can always be conceived by liberal onlookers, and they may appeal to our minds when we contemplate them. But they are politically useless and of little moral value if they can in nowise be put into effect. Such solutions cannot claim the word "just," for they are never either relevant or real. To refuse to move the women on idealistic grounds would not have been just; it would merely have resulted in the irresponsible—and much more unjust—political act of leaving the Belgians homeless. In this case, compromise of one's moral principles appeared to me to be morally necessary.

The reason behind this surprising irrelevance of "pure" justice was, I decided, this strange factor of power. Politics is essentially the art of the possible—not of the ideal. Fundamentally it involves enacting solutions to community problems in actual life, rather than thinking out solutions to intellectual problems in the realm of thought—although the enacting should be well thought out tool for this reason, political action is limited by the amount of power available to put the solution into effect. Here our ability to be just is directly proportional to our ability to perform. Thus, I came to believe, are power and social justice not opposed, as pacifists often contend, but are interrelated.

That neither the course of events nor even we ourselves could easily be molded according to our best ideals and standards was a new thought for me. Every political decision, I was learning, must take place within the given context of its situation, within the balance of social forces operating at the moment. Each decision can only choose the best among the possibilities that that particular situation makes available. We do not act in political life because our act is just. We act because the pressures of the moment force us to resolve in one way or another some vital problem in the community. Then we hope, and strive, that the resolution which we can affect is in the measure possible to that occasion, the most just solution available. But the main thing is that the act resolves the given problem creatively, and that life go on—in this case, I concluded ruefully, that the Belgians can at least get in out of the wet.

Those of us who were on committees at the beginning had been appointed to our posts rather than elected. Although I was a convinced believer in democracy, the fact that I was appointed had hardly bothered me. Nor did it at first occur to me that a more democratic way of choosing our camp government might be preferable. I liked my job; I was delighted to be a "big shot." The thought of a possible election probably signaled more of a threat than a promise to the average committeeman.

I soon noticed, however, that my own attitude was changing, as was that of the other men in similar work. The remarks people made to us when we sought to deal with them did the most to effect this change. When we tried to move anyone, or change anybody's status for the worse, we were met by suspicious questions about ourselves:

"Where do you get the authority to come in here and tell me to move?" someone would say. "Why aren't you moving, too, if it's so all-fired important that we move? And why aren't your friends being moved? Incidentally, I notice those other committeemen aren't moving either!"

Such a fog of suspicion could never be dispelled so long as we held office by appointment. Then the question "How did you get your authority?" was not answerable. Our authority derived merely from the other committeemen and not from the persons with whom we had to deal; in the most concrete sense, it was an illegitimate authority.

One reason that democracy is essential as a form of government suddenly dawned on me: under it, authority is derived from the very people who suffer from its exercise, and a rational answer can be given to the question of its legitimacy. If I had been elected, I could have said, "How did I get this authority? From you! And if you do not feel we are doing an honest job, pick someone else at the next election."

Amusingly, therefore, the very men who at first basked in the security of having been appointed found they preferred the risk of elected status. This was not because of "faith in democracy," though most of us had that, but because of the need to compel the carping public to share in part with us some of the onus for the unpopular actions we must take. As the supplies man remarked: "Then the people who always complain will have helped to put me here in this post. I can more easily overlook their carping at what they call my inefficiency and dishonesty! — because they have elected me, and so it's their fault as much as mine!"

For these reasons, after six months in camp, it became a regular practice, twice a year, to elect the nine chairmen of the committees. Gradually, the same process of "democratization" took place in all those positions of responsibility where conflicts could occur, where complaints were common and suspicions likely.

Being the manager of a kitchen was, for example, a post of real responsibility. All the kitchen's supplies and the appointment of its laboring force were in the manager's hands. Naturally, with the supplies meager at best, diners wondered—sometimes silently and sometimes aloud—whether all the supplies were reaching the diners' menus. The political result of these suspicions was, as in the other cases, the establishment of a full-blown democracy in our kitchen.

The unintended founder of our kitchen's democracy and the "heroine" of the tale I am about to relate, was the weightier half of a most extraordinary couple, the Witherspoons. Mrs. Witherspoon's husband, a lawyer, was a small, seedy man with a tiny mustache; and he was, apparently, a born pilferer. It was well known in North China society that he had been ejected from the club for stealing soap. No old China Hand would play cards or golf with him because, so the report ran, he invariably cheated. But the good lawyer who, fortunately, had given up serious practice years before, and was a frail reed indeed compared to his massive lady.

She was a heavily girdled, wallowing, mastodon of a woman, with white hair, a hard, strong face, and an even stronger will. Neighbors reported that her poor spouse was buffeted about like a canoe in a hurricane when she went after him. He would shoot out the door of their small room followed by a torrent of verbiage. Then, puttering about in the still waters of the tiny garden at the end of their small plot, he would ease his harried soul by talking back to her under his breath while she bellowed at him from within. Rumor had it that she drove him to go on his petty pilfering raids, and would threaten in stentorian tones not to let him in the door if he came back empty-handed. In any case, it was true that he had been tried and convicted of several attempts to snatch from the kitchen more than the couple's rightful portion of food and to lift supplies off the carts as they came by.

This strange pair had arrived late in camp, and had come well stocked with supplies, especially sugar. By April, 1944, however, these stores apparently had run out. Suddenly Mrs. Witherspoon began to take an active interest in the sugar issued to the kitchens.

Rumors began to circulate among the diners that they were not getting all the sugar issued to the kitchen because the cooks were taking some home each time a sweet was made. All such rumors could be traced back to Mrs. Witherspoon. Finally, in May, after smoldering all winter, she declared open war. In a concerted house-to-house campaign, she fomented accusations that the kitchen management had been stealing sugar and then falsifying the careful books that were kept in the locked store-rooms.

We who worked in the kitchen were well aware that small amounts of sugar—along with larger quantities of meat and vegetables—disappeared regularly. But the charge that the management was organizing and abetting this state of affairs rather than seeking to prevent it, we knew to be false. Since the diners were hardly satisfied with the sweetness of our paltry desserts, however, these tales found a ready hearing. The result was that just when the food in the kitchen was at its best, suspicion began to poison the atmosphere.

"Is it all there, bud?" "Just see, Mac, that they don't steal the salt, too—eh?" We didn't know with whom we were more angry—the unscrupulous Mrs. Witherspoon or the gullible diners who believed her rumors.

The staff called a general meeting of the diners and demanded that the kitchen as a whole take action on this matter. First, we suggested that a committee representing the diners be elected to investigate the kitchen and propose ways of its improvement. Next, we stipulated that the Discipline Committee be requested to investigate our practices so that Mrs. Witherspoon's accusations would be confirmed or forever silenced.

Then began a fantastic, dreamlike investigation. It was one not unlike those of the McCarthy era, where the accusations to be proved or disproved were so mammoth and incredible that no one could believe them except those who wanted to. At the same time, disproof was exceedingly difficult to establish conclusively. Now that she had the attention of the Discipline Committee, and was the center of every camp discussion, Mrs. Witherspoon was delighted to be quite specific in her accusations, which only made them more incredible. She did not hesitate to specify just what sweets over the last three months had received less sugar than recorded by the cooks, and how much had been purloined by the staff in that period. The amount she named was gigantic: three hundred pounds—almost equal to the total received by the kitchen during that time!

I remember my feelings of incredulity when I read her statement.

"Damn," I said to Stan, who was on the cooking shift with me. "Six of those desserts she mentions we made! Remember on that cake last week, you and Laura were weighing that sugar into the bowls while I was marking down the figures? The old gal's nuts, no doubt of it. But how do you prove it? How can you prove you didn't steal something, if you were there and were handling it?"

"Yeah, that's a tough job," Stan said with a sigh. "But look at it this way. To get away with that sugar while we are making a cake, think of the others we'd have to have in on the deal—twenty women volunteers, and the eight men on the shift, not to mention the two cooks, the manager, and the two storekeepers! You might make such an involved plot work once. But can you imagine that whole motley gang of about thirty-five people—most of whom can't stand the sight of each other—working secretly in cahoots for three or four months, with no one the wiser but Mrs. Witherspoon? No one will believe that, don't worry!"

Stan was right—few people did believe the woman when she was required to bring her vague suspicions into the form of a concrete theory of what had happened. During the investigation, her case disintegrated further. She was asked by one member of the Discipline Committee why she was so sure that twenty-five pounds of sugar could not have been put into a certain cake.

"Because it's impossible, that's why," she said somewhat irritably. "Look, the cooks say one hundred pounds of flour were put into the cake. Well, with twenty-five pounds of sugar that's one part sugar to four parts flour. Now see here, the most expensive cakes at home," and she brandished Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, "have only two parts flour to one part sugar. And you can't tell me that that cake last week wasn't a lot less than half as sweet as the kind of cake I'm talking about. Why, you could hardly taste the sugar. I'll bet there were at least eight or nine parts flour to one part sugar. In other words, only about twelve pounds of sugar were used!"

To prove it, she opened her cookbook and pointed to a recipe which called for one cup of sugar and two cups of flour. I must say I was slightly shaken by this—never having seen a cake recipe before. I agreed that our cakes were by no means half as sweet as a good cake at home; so if the recipes there really called for two parts flour to one part sugar, our one hundred pounds to twenty-five pounds did look suspicious.

Then as I watched the face of my cooking partner, Laura, I saw her bewildered look give way to an amused smile. She said to Mrs. Witherspoon with some asperity:

"You poor lady. If you had ever looked inside a cookbook before, you would know that a cup of sugar weighs twice as much as the same bulk of flour. Fannie's recipe is set in terms of bulk and reads one part sugar to two of flour. Translated into weight, which is the measure we use, the same recipe would read entirely differently: one unit flour to one unit sugar. For a cake for eight hundred persons that would have meant using one hundred pounds of sugar to one hundred pounds of flour. It would have been a much sweeter cake than we could produce with our paltry twenty-five pounds of sugar. No wonder it didn't taste like Fannie's cakes to you! It had less than one-fourth the sugar in it that she called for!"

It was evident that Mrs. Witherspoon had been an expert on telling the No. 1 boy to order the cook to make a cake for tea. And that was the limit of her culinary experience.

Finally, Mrs. Witherspoon was asked, why, beyond her cook-book calculations, had she been so certain that this stealing was taking place? Had she seen someone taking sugar, or heard credible reports of its use by the staff in their rooms? Her only answer was, no, that like any diner she had eaten the sweets and her taste told her the sugar was missing. Now we knew there was little to be gained by arguing with her about taste. But we did concoct a way of measuring to the satisfaction of the committee the reliability of her taste buds.

The next morning, without any prior notice and in the presence of the Discipline Committee, we sweetened the cereal ration with a large portion of sugar. That afternoon Mrs. Witherspoon was asked whether she had eaten the cereal that morning. When she replied that she had, she was asked: "And did it taste sweet to you?" "Not at all," she retorted huffily, and she promptly gave her oath that she had tasted no sugar in it.

To her astonishment, both she and the case were summarily dismissed. As Campbell said with a twinkle, "The one ground for theft you proffered, my good lady, was the accuracy of your taste buds. These have now been shown to be unreliable at best. Since you have adduced no evidence, there is no basis for further investigation. Unfortunately, there are neither libel nor perjury laws in this camp, else you might be in serious difficulty. Let me merely say that this committee will not be interested in any further accusations or complaints from either you or your husband."

The most tangible result of this hullabaloo about sugar was the radical revision of the political structure of the kitchen. The Diners Committee that had investigated the matter with the Discipline Committee recommended that henceforth the post of manager be elective. As they said in their report, by this means not only would the electorate be guaranteed the opportunity regularly to change kitchen administrations—the diners also would be reminded of their own responsibility for the government of the kitchen and, therefore, would contribute by assent to the legitimate authority of the manager in kitchen affairs.

And so it went. Gradually, every position in camp which might become a focal point of conflict, suspicion, and turmoil, became an elective office. When the first election of the kitchen manager was held, I thought to myself, "It may have been, as I recall Reinhold Niebuhr once saying somewhere, the goodness and rationality of men which made the rise of democracy in human affairs possible. But certainly in our camp, it has been the grousing, the orneriness and the outright resentments of men that have made it necessary. Democracy forces the strong to give up power and the carping public to take it on—and with it a sense of responsibility. Perhaps part of the superiority of democracy to the other forms of government lies just here: it reduces the chances not only of a greedy tyranny inflicted from above, but also of a resentful revolt from the bottom."

While politically we became a democracy, economically our society remained completely socialistic throughout its course. All the means of production were managed by representatives of the community as a whole and not by private individuals who owned these means. Also, it was up to the camp government to see that all services were available to each internee, regardless of his capacity to work. We were in effect an economy in which "from each according to his ability and to each according to his need" (as the Marxist doctrine stipulates) was the unquestioned principle by which both our labor and the distribution of our goods were organized.

Any other social and economic structure was so inconceivable that even the most rabid capitalists—and there were plenty of them among us from the ranks of businessmen of North China—never questioned its rightness for us. The particular capitalistic way of looking at the ownership of the means of production was completely irrelevant. To have considered, for example, the kitchens or the bakery as the private property of those skilled enough to rebuild them and strong enough to run them, and consequently, to have allowed these "owners" to sell their products to others, would have been quite unthinkable. To refuse food, heat, or water to those too young, too old, or too feeble to earn their keep by work, would have seemed abysmally cruel to the hardest-hearted among us.

I had heard often enough from the lips of conservative leaders in America that there is only one "natural" economic order, namely that of competitive free enterprise. It was the one way any society can be organized, they maintained, and still remains healthy and creative. But our experience indicated that the system that may work in one context may not be constructive in the next. In America the geographical and economic situation have made possible the development of a most creative system of private ownership. It may well be, however, that in other countries with different situations; other economic solutions are more creative than the one we ourselves prefer—as, one hopes, both America and the Communists are learning. In a lifeboat, capitalists as well as socialists will, if they are to remain men and not beasts, share their water as a common possession rather than regard it as the private property of those who brought it aboard.

Although no pattern other than the one described was remotely possible, this one, we found, was by no means ideal. In fact, it revealed some fascinating problems—problems perhaps more frequent in non capitalist societies, but perhaps also common to almost any sort of economic structure.

The paramount one was that of the efficiency of labor. How do you get lazy men to work and to work hard, if you don't hire them, if you don't pay them wages and are thus unable to fire them? An answer to this question was not easy to find. No one in the camp ever discovered a way to stop a lazy man from being lazy.

The most commonly suggested solution was to put a slacker on one of the toughest jobs:

"Make the bum sweat just like the rest of us. Don't you see, what he wants is to have the sort of easy job you've given him!"

This recipe sounds great—in theory. But putting one of these fellows on a hard-working shift in the bakery or the kitchen was like putting an uncoordinated and flabby man into the line of a top-flight professional football team. In a high-powered job, a lazy fellow who didn't carry his weight always caused endless confusion and trouble. In the end, the whole shift would threaten to quit unless he were removed.

The most famous case of this sort was that of a Hungarian named Kovaks. He enjoyed a riper reputation for a shady past than anyone in camp, and was the proud possessor of passports from four different nations. A wide, squat man, he had curly reddish hair, a flat face, and hard, cold, unblinking, indeed, almost reptilian eyes. He was a nervous, busty sort of fellow, affable, but completely inattentive when one talked to him, as if he had on his mind a deal that had to be consummated that very night. He was altogether useless on any job.

One time when I was manager of the kitchen, I agreed to try him as a pan washer (the man who kept all the important cooking utensils clean for their continual use in the kitchen). I shall never forget his first day. I got to the kitchen about eight, right after roll call, to see how things were coming along for breakfast and lunch. I found the head cook in a fury. Taking me over to the sink, where a pile of unwashed pans was already mounting, he said:

"Who's the goddamn pan washer and where the hell is he? He was supposed to have gotten here two hours ago to clean up for breakfast! My helpers are going to have to do this work, which they won't like at all— and neither do I!"

Making a mental note to tell Kovaks when he finally appeared that he simply must get there on time, I went out to attend to something else. About two hours later, I came back to find the pantry still empty, except for the stack of dirty pans, which was now immense.

"Hasn't that lazy bum showed up yet?" I asked.

"Oh Lord yes," groaned the now resigned head cook. "He turned up about nine. He came in here and asked me what he was supposed to do. I led him to the stack of pans in the pantry, and told him to get to work. He took one look at that pile, put his hand to his head, cried out, 'Mein Gott im Himmel!' and fled on his fat legs. We haven't seen the bastard since, and I don't expect to. That's the last time, Gilkey, I'll take on a chap like Kovaks as a part of my outfit!"

When I got over laughing at the picture of Kovaks' thunder-struck awareness of what work meant, I realized what the cook was saying: no lazy man can be used on an important job. The only thing to do was to assign him such a completely insignificant task that when he failed to appear, it didn't matter.

An ironic twist to this story was that on the day Kovaks arrived—he was sent into camp late—his first question was about the black market. From that day to the end, he was busy fifteen hours a day, rushing around buying and selling all manner of things illegally. But when it came to assigned work, for which he received neither the satisfaction of excitement nor the reward of hard cash, he refused to stir himself.

Then there was Jacobson—what could one do with a person like him? He was a wealthy American businessman from Tientsin who must have worked hard for his small fortune, but who found that the mere prospect of manual labor in the camp made him slightly queasy. A man in his middle forties, Jacobson had evidently in Tientsin been running slightly to fat. But he was now so well thinned-out by camp life that his formerly rotund face hung down in soft folds with the infinite sadness of a sorrowful basset.

Jacobson had been given almost every job in camp—except the hard ones. He finally ended up in the kitchen as a "vegetable helper," one of a pair of older men who helped the women vegetable teams by carrying and washing the baskets of vegetables. When I came on as manager, I was a little puzzled that a man in his forties should have this sort of light job, usually reserved for men in their sixties. I asked the doctors if there was anything wrong with him. No, they said, he had been repeatedly checked by them and there was absolutely nothing wrong with him organically. I approached Jacobson on the issue one day, and this is what he told me:

"Yes, it's true. Neither doctor in camp has been able to find out what is wrong. It's quite mysterious really, Gilkey. You see, after working a bit, I begin to feel weak and nauseous." Gingerly he would touch his stomach as if it were all starting up again. "I begin to feel dizzy, as if a fainting spell were coming on. I sit down for a while and have a smoke. Then the funny feeling goes away, and I can begin to work—slowly and easily, you know, because anything else brings it back that much quicker. I try not to talk about my troubles with anyone, Gilkey. I guess that's why so many people say I'm lazy and just don't like work. But you understand I'm sure."

And with this he got up slowly, with a hand on his tender stomach, and walked deliberately back to the old bathtub in which he and his elderly partner were scrubbing potatoes. Looking up at me with a brave smile after he had bent stiffly over the tub to begin his scrubbing, he said with infinite sadness, "This was a damnably large issue of potatoes today!"

Such cases as Kovaks and Jacobson were immune to the pressure of public opinion. Almost always the worst malingerers were well known throughout the camp. They were called slackers —and worse—by everyone, and often to their faces; but this never made them work harder. They continued cheerily to nurse their ailments, to avoid every kind of unpleasant labor simply by refusing to do it. The reason, of course, that they could thus withstand the hostile attitude of other workers was that they had their own set of friends who completely shared their revulsion concerning work. Therefore they did not care what the others thought. They felt, reasonably enough, that a soft job was more important than the respect of those in whom they had no interest.

We never really solved the problem of the lazy worker. To take a job away from him was no punishment. It was what men like Kovaks and Jacobson really wanted, since they knew they would be fed whether they worked or not. In the end, watching Jacobson slowly picking up a basket of leeks, I concluded that only the development of some kind of real incentive, whether in the form of material reward or of inner morale, could ever change lazy people into hard workers—as the prospect of a cash return would surely galvanize Jacobson into action once he was free!

Ultimately, the question of efficient labor leads to the deeper questions of motivation and the meaningfulness of work. About this problem, classical socialist theory has, in my view, been far too cavalier and idealistic. Socialist writers have thought, in optimistic fashion, that once men are enabled to work for their own community rather than for masters, they will labor for the sheer joy of it. Our work was communal enough for anyone; no owners reaped the reward of others' labor. But there was precious little evidence of this sheer love of work. At any rate, it became clear to me that the question of incentive remained one of the most serious problems for societies that offered total security regardless of work accomplished. Correspondingly, the question of humane treatment of both its victims and its misfits haunts those economies which offer rewards only for work well done.

A somewhat related but equally stubborn labor problem was that of the inefficient worker—the man who was willing enough, but who simply wasn't much good. How does a manager deal with him?

As I found out soon after I took over, a manager received plenty of free advice on all his problems. One day I became conscious that the line of people waiting for hot water was unusually long. Stepping up to the boiler to see what was the cause of the delay, I found out quickly enough: there was a new stoker on, and he couldn't get his fire hot enough at the crucial hour of four o'clock when the whole British empire was waiting, wanting its tea. I felt sorry for him; he was my old boss cook Edwin Parker, the art dealer. Edwin was a hard and able worker in other lines, but he couldn't get the hang of stoking. While I stood there, I heard a familiar voice down the line sounding off. It came from a Yorkshire man named Thomas, a nice fellow but one with a tendency to gripe when things weren't going the way he thought they should. Now he was saying in a loud, disgruntled tone, "An efficient management would have gotten rid of that sort of stoker and put on a chap who knows his business!"

Remarks like that tend to stick in one's mind. Two days later, Edwin told me he was fed up and wanted to quit. I went around to the Labor Committee to see whom I might get to replace him. This process consisted first of finding out who was for the moment off a job, or who wanted a change, and then asking to have him assigned to the kitchen. Since we couldn't compel anyone to take a job, and had no rewards to offer, it was not always easy to persuade someone to take a job like stoking. But when my friend Matthew Read, the second man on the Labor Committee, told me that Thomas was leaving his present job, Thomas' own advice came back to me and I laughed. Telling the Labor Committee—a two-man affair—the story, I said, "For goodness' sake, give the job to Thomas. He thinks all you need to do here to run a kitchen is to hire efficient labor."

"Yes," said Matt, "we have plenty of problems with managers all right, but not of this sort. Our labor troubles stem from the fact that we have to use inefficient people because there just aren’t enough of any other kinds. We'll give the job to Thomas—maybe then he'll look more tolerantly on the way things are run here. And mind you, this is one case where you won't have to talk a chap into being a stoker—Thomas won't dare refuse!"

Poor old Thomas! He went on the job as green as the art dealer had been. For the first week his fires wouldn't boil the water at the right time. I used to drop around the hot water room to see how things were going about the time the line was getting really angry. It was a terrible temptation to say, "Well, it's certainly a relief finally to have a man on the job who really knows his work." But Thomas tried hard. Knowing as well as I why he had been put on that job, he would look at me so sheepishly that I never had the heart to rub it in.

As this and many similar experiences made me realize, there were just so many working men in the camp, no more, and all the labor had to be performed by that one small group. Some of these men were good workers, some were not; no amount of "efficiency experting" on the part of management could increase the number of the former or decrease the number of the latter. At bottom the labor problem, like all the others that I encountered, boiled down to the question of the kind of people who make up the society—their capacity, their training, their skills, and their willingness to work.

Another problem generated by our particular form of society was that of distribution. Since we were not a price economy where the ability to pay determines how goods are to be spread around, we had to distribute our supplies according to some other principle. In such a situation, we all assumed quite without thought that the sole fair and workable principle was that of equality. But to my astonishment, as case after case showed, equality is often less than "fair," and, when that is true, the problems of distribution are baffling indeed.

Distribution in the kitchen was our worst headache. It seemed that in this department we could never avoid cataclysmic crises. Eventually, we had to appoint a special "dining room manager." He was Bertram Carter, the charming and diplomatic representative of Thomas Cook and Sons in Peking.

Our problems were gigantic. When there is plenty to eat, as in the armed services, the size of a portion is irrelevant, since one can always get more. But when there is less than enough, all servings must be exactly equal, 1 /800th of the total amount made. In the case of most dishes it is impossible to gauge with any accuracy what that 1 /800th of the total is.

If we guessed wrong either way, there was always trouble. When we served too little and ended up with a surplus, the remainder was served in "seconds." But then the families who collected their food and ate it at home, on hearing of this later, would rightly complain that they got less than their full ration. And if we served too much, a worse tragedy resulted: the end of the line would get nothing, and furious was a mild word for their feelings! The only way to handle this situation, we decided, was to have intelligent elderly men (trained accountants and bankers were best) to stand by the serving table and count the people as they came along, keeping careful check on how much had been given out, and increasing the serving or decreasing it proportionately as we went along. But even this made people angry: for late diners might find their portions less than what early ones received or vice versa—and again we would be accused of being unfair.

One time after a whole group of people had berated us because their portions were unequal, I said to Bertram, "My God, Bertram, the root of the demand for equal treatment as we saw it tonight is not the outraged sense of justice for the other fellow, as I had always thought. It is the frustrated desire to get for yourself all that is coming to you. It is of more moment to us that our neighbor doesn't get a bigger share than we have, than it is that he gets as much as we do. Self-interest, of course, is also the root of our desire to get more than our neighbor—and that is one reason, isn't it, that life is so damned complicated! For then there really isn't as much difference as we like to think between the ordinary guy demanding justice for himself and the heel who wants to take more than the next guy. One's a kind of polite respectable, legal sort of self-interest, the other's a rude, anti social and illegal one—but both are motivated by the same thing."

"That's right," said Bertram, "and remember the potatoes."

He was speaking of our most glaring case of the interrelation of self-interest, equality, and the stupidities in life. Until the last year of camp, the kitchens received about once every two weeks an issue large enough to give every diner one whole potato a piece. This meant that we could either bake the potatoes in the ovens and so give the diners a delicious change, or else boil them in their skins and serve them that way. In either case, they were far tastier than peeled and chopped up in stew, and more healthful into the bargain because the skins were not thrown away

Everyone agreed that this was marvelous—but every time we tried it, we were assailed by complaints.

What we were up against was the hard fact that the good Lord makes potatoes in different shapes and sizes. Those who received the smaller potatoes were outraged—at us, at the Japanese, at the world—and invariably they lodged the strongest sort of protest at this unfairness. Again and again we tried to explain that if potatoes were to be served baked or boiled whole, and everyone wanted that, then some people had to get the smaller potatoes. But this point was far too logical when rights are abused and tempers aroused. Finally, quite against our own better judgment, that of the doctors, and the real desires of the diners, we had to peel, slice, and serve in equal portions all issues of potatoes.

Though it seemed silly to worry about the size of the potato serving, I also realized that in an affluent society we may be relaxed about our dinner servings because there is more if we wish. But with the basic essentials of life, such as our salary, a promotion, or an honor in our profession, we are just as furious if some colleague gets favored treatment over ourselves.

Pondering further on this point, I thought of the strange fact that in history, justice seems to ride on the back of self-interest rather than on that of virtue. The drive on the part of underprivileged groups to receive a greater share of this world's goods and privileges is surely a movement toward greater justice in human affairs, and for that reason, it has always seemed to me, should be supported by every morally serious person. Nevertheless, however virtuous the "cause," it is well to recall that those who justly clamor for more equality are as much motivated by self-concern as are those more fortunate ones who stubbornly seek to preserve their unequal privileges. Thus, contrary to our usual opinion, the justice of a group's cause, which requires our support of it, does not indicate any greater amount of virtue or any less amount of self-interest on the part of that unfortunate group. And somewhat grimly I thought to myself, "It's a safe bet that when they in turn become top dogs, they probably will defend their new privileges as desperately and unjustly as their former masters defended theirs—and then the just man may well find himself on the other side."

The strangest thing I was discovering about the principle of equality, however, was how often it was actually unfair. Whenever, in fact, the needs of people really differed from those of their neighbors, it was manifestly unjust to give them equal portions. From the beginning it was agreed that infants, pregnant women, the sick, and the aged needed special kinds of food, especially food containing more of those elements most desired by all, such as proteins, fats, and sugar. To satisfy these special needs, the diet kitchen was established in the hospital, and everyone accepted the principle embodied there that a "just" distribution should in these cases be unequal, that is, determined solely by special needs. Noting the vast difference between the principles governing that kitchen from those operative in our own, I thought, "Here is a case where seemingly love would appear to have triumphed over law. Even better put, where love has become embodied in organized practice. Here a generous concern for the unique needs of individual cases has replaced our practice in the kitchen of governing all cases by the one general rule of equality."

I soon realized that as usual I had been too optimistic. Life cannot be run in a way that so easily dispenses with strict principles, with general laws by which individual cases are determined. Thus the diet kitchen in itself was a welter of ironclad rules. People claimed over and over, on no valid grounds, that they were special cases, and demanded "their fair extra portions." The ironic consequence was that strict rules had to be established to determine who really deserved the status of an exception to the law of equality. No one without a doctor's prescription could qualify for the diet kitchen or for extra rations in the main kitchens.

The same was true of all exceptions. Special events such as birthday parties and anniversaries always called for small extra rations from the kitchens: an extra potato, a bit of extra flour, and so on. Experience quickly showed that no such exceptions could safely be made unless some general laws were established to govern them: only birthdays and wedding anniversaries, and only a cup of flour, etc. Otherwise, every one of the 799 other diners would have been clamoring for these extras, and our supplies would by no means have gone around. A kind of special mercy is necessary in the equitable running of any large organization, but benevolence to special cases cannot be "free- wheeling."

As Matt and I decided when we used to mull over all this in the evening, even exceptions to the law have to be determined legalistically. It seems impossible ever completely to leave the realm of law and enter the paradise of love where each is merely given what he needs and asks for, because in his self-concern, what a man asks for will always be more than he needs and also more than he sees his neighbor getting.

The reason the Marxists can never reach their idyllic level of "communism" beyond what Marx called "the selfish calculation of bourgeois rights" is not because of problems in production. Rather it is because the dominance of self-interest in mankind will always make the law necessary to protect men against their rapacious neighbors.

What baffled us the most in this area was the problem of exceptions for the heavy workers. With some justice, they always felt they deserved a larger ration of food than those who did not work so hard or actually needed or wanted less. There seemed no way that such a just but unequal distribution could be handled officially. A separate line for the heavy workers was often suggested, but the difficulty of defining fairly that favored class made the solution impossible, and we felt it would raise so much jealousy among the rest that it was never even tried.

The eventual solution was "unofficial." That is, workers simply carried home extra rations of the supplies connected with their particular work. Stokers carted off coke from their fires, helpers in the kitchen took seconds, bakers got a private loaf, fitters availed themselves of extra wood or stove pipes, and so on. These were called "perks," from the word "perquisite," and in moderation they were generally accepted morally and legally as a justified reward for hard labor done.

As might be expected, this practice gradually got out of hand. Men on their day off would demand these extras; men who never had done heavy work were found helping themselves; and more than "leftovers"—that is actual raw supplies—began to appear among the usual "perks." At this point the others' gorge rose; accusations of corruption and embezzlement were hurled at bakery, kitchen or fitter's shop; and a widespread reaction against the practice as a whole set in. A concerted effort was made to ban the entire practice of "perks" by declaring them illegal.

The new law banning all "perks" quickly defeated its own purpose. That purpose had been to prevent the normal "perks" from mushrooming into outright stealing. But the law itself, by calling "perks" a crime, blurred fatally just that distinction between stealing and the mild "perks" it sought to preserve. By blurring that distinction, it made impossible the prosecution of the serious matter of stealing.

One of the stokers in the kitchen was a former official in a Far Eastern shipping line, a rather high-class type with a good education. Shortly after the law went into effect, he was caught taking home buckets of lump coal (rather than the coke made by his fires) from the kitchen yard.

At his trial he defended himself by maintaining that his act was not stealing, but the common "perk" for his stoking job. Thus, said he, what he did was merely something that every stoker did by common practice and so his case was no different in kind from tens of others. Consequently, he continued, while he recognized that "perks" were now against the law, he demanded that every stoker in camp stand with him in the dock, or else he would claim that he was being tried unfairly.

His sharp defense—one could see the advantage of a trained mind—put the court in a tough spot, as it was calculated to do. The Discipline Committee had no intention of prosecuting all the other stokers whom they knew were continuing to take home "mild perks" as usual. What the committee wished to prosecute was stealing, and the members were certain that what this man had been doing was just that. They had, however, to acquit him, for they could not define legally the subtle but important difference between a normal "perk" and stealing so long as the law regarded both as crimes. What was needed was a legal definition of a legitimate "perk" so that anything beyond that could be effectively prosecuted. The mistake had been to seek to abolish an accepted pattern of the community's life—rather than to control it within reasonable bounds.

Shortly after the conclusion of this case, another man was caught taking raw supplies home from the kitchen. When he, too, claimed that this was his rightful "perk" and that he was then "no different from any other kitchen worker and so could not be prosecuted unless they all are, — this mistake in the law became plain to everyone.

As we all knew, "perks" had not ceased because of the law against them. On the contrary, all that had occurred by the promulgation of an idealistic law was the removal of the law from its relevance to the social scene—and that was a serious matter. For then, practices which the community would not accept were legally identifiable with continuing practices that it did accept, and so the law became incapable of coping with precisely those actions it was designed to prevent.

By common consent, therefore, the law against "perks" was abolished. A more sensible and effective effort was made to control them instead. Having been officially recognized, they could then be carefully defined. During the last year, the administration of each utility made out a careful list of the "perks" recognized on each of its jobs. If, by common practice, any job had had no "perk"—for example, it was difficult to find one for the latrine cleaners—we managers had to dream one up, for a ‘`perk" had now become everyone's right! This was hardly ideal legislation, justifying as it did an unequal distribution. But because "perks" were legally defined, stealing could now be dealt with by the law.

We discussed at length how the distinction between "perks"— a relatively unjust and so socially acceptable practice—and stealing—a radically unjust and so socially unacceptable practice— might be drawn. This was not easy to do. Amount was not involved, nor could we rest content merely with the arbitrary principle of the authorization of management—such and such is a "perk," such and such is not. Finally, it was generally agreed among us that the dividing line came between raw supplies and goods about to be served, on the one hand, and prepared goods that remained after communal use, on the other. No worker in the kitchen was allowed to take home raw meat, vegetables, and so on, or to go off with his extra before serving time. His "perks" came from a division of whatever was left over after serving, and if we ran out or only had barely enough, he got no "perks." If, however, there was some left over from the initial serving, then the kitchen staff got first crack at second portions. Correspondingly, stokers could not take home any raw coal, but only the coke produced by their fires.

This principle at first glance looked ironclad. But human nature can work its will even within such rules. When we made cakes in the kitchen, we always made extras so there would be some left over! And stokers dealt with their fires in just that loving fashion which produces fine coke! Still this was a fairly sensible way of handling the problem and it infinitely clarified the legal situation with respect to the utilities.

Matthew Read and I used to talk by the hour about the strange relation of law to society which this whole problem highlighted. Somewhat to our surprise, we found we agreed that the law was made necessary because of self-interest, and that therefore its primary function was not, as I had always thought, that of stating what is abstractly just and right, but rather that of controlling self-interest, and molding it into socially creative rather than socially destructive patterns.

An idealistic law may state beautifully the abstract principles which should be operative for a perfect society. But as our experience was continually demonstrating, then it would fail to fulfill its necessary function as law, namely, that of controlling the self-interested and potentially dangerous predatory activities of man against his neighbor.

Law, it seemed to us, must be just in the sense that in controlling behavior it should mold behavior in more and more creative and equal directions—else needless suffering result and society be engulfed in conflict. But first of all, law must be an agent of control. Thus it must be practical. It must be in touch with actual patterns of behavior if it is to be the controller of them. Consequently effective law is almost always a good deal less than the ideal.

Man as a personal and social being—and also, as I believe, as a child of God—is responsible to his neighbor. For this reason, creative law must move toward the ideal. But man, as I was learning, is also a sinner seeking more than his neighbor at his neighbor's expense. Therefore, effective law must be "earthy" enough to exert that control over his behavior which is essential if there is to be any human society at all.

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