Both these reports were focussing upon Moral Re-Armament's work in industry, one of its major emphases since World War II. Buchman's vision for industry had, from the first, been both simple and exalted. It was meant to 'produce enough for the needs of all'.2 The basic need was a new motivation in people at all levels. 'Suppose everybody cared enough, everybody shared enough, wouldn't everybody have enough?' he had said in East Ham Town Hall in 1938. '... Only a new spirit in men can bring a new spirit in industry. Industry can be the pioneer of a new order, where service replaces selfishness, and where industrial planning is based upon the guidance of God.'3

He felt management and labour could 'work together, like the fingers on the hand',4 and in order to make that possible he aimed to answer 'the self-will in management and labour who are both so right, and so wrong'.5

This philosophy was in Buchman's view the answer to the class war which was being wastefully fought by people on both sides. He did not see Moral Re-Armament's function as taking sides on economic nostrums - private enterprise versus nationalisation, for instance - nor as working out detailed solutions for particular factories or industries. That was the task of the people involved in each situation. Moral Re-Armament's role was to offer the experience which would free those people's hearts and minds from the motivations or prejudices which prevent just solutions. Buchman believed that if 'the forgotten factor' of God's plan and purpose became a reality to people in any situation, they would be free to find solutions which had previously eluded them. It would take hard work and detailed negotiations. Everything would not be solved automatically just by people changing, but often the way to creative thought was blocked until someone did change - and, in the world at large, that was the last thing people thought possible.

However, by 1953 numerous business men and industrialists in many parts of the world were trying to conduct their affairs on these principles and, according to William Grogan, an International Vice-President of the American Transport Workers' Union, 'between 1946 and 1953 national union leaders, local union officials, shop stewards and rank and file union members from seventy-five countries had received training' in them 'at Caux and Mackinac Island, or in their own countries'.6 Not all of these, of course, had applied MRA principles when they got home, nor did all those who did have startling results to report; but Evert Kupers, for twenty years President of the Dutch Confederation of Trades Unions, stated that 'the thousands who have visited Caux have been deeply impressed by its message for our age and by the real comradeship they found there'.7

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