THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID
If all the unbrained money in the world to-day and the men that go with
it could be isolated, could be taken by men of imagination and put in a
few ships and sent off to an island in the sea--if New York and London
and all the other important places could be left in the hands of the men
who have imagination, poor and rich, they would soon have the world in
shape to make the men with merely owning minds, the mere owners off on
their island, beg to come back to it, to be allowed to have a share in
it on any terms.
In order to be fair, of course, their island would have to be a
furnished island--mines, woods, and everything they could want. It would
become a kind of brute wilderness or desert in twenty-five years. We
could, now and then, some of us, take happy little trips, go out and
look them over on their little furnished island. It would do us good to
watch them--these men with merely owning or holding-on minds, really
noticing at last how unimportant they are.
But it is not necessary to resort to a furnished island as a device, as
a mirror for making mere millionaires see themselves.
This is a thing that could be done for millionaires now, most of them,
here just where they are.
All that is necessary is to have the brains of the world so organized
that the millionaires who expect merely because they are millionaires to
be run after by brains, cannot get any brains to run after them.
I am in favour of organizing the brains of the world into a trades
union.
One of the next things that is going to happen is that the managing and
creating minds of the world to-day are going to organize, are going to
see suddenly their real power and use it. The brains are about to have,
as labour and capital already have, a class consciousness.
I would not claim that there is going to be an international strike of
the brains of the world, but it will not be long before the managing
class as a class will be organized so that they can strike if they want
to.
The Artists or Organizers and Managers of business will not need
probably, in order to accomplish their purpose, to strike against the
uncreative millionaires. They will make a stand (which the best of them
have already made now) for the balance of power in any business that
they furnish their brains to. The brains that create the profits for the
owners and that create the labour for the labourers, will make terms for
their brains and will withhold their brains if necessary to this end.
But it is far more likely that they will accomplish their purpose sooner
by using their brains for the millionaires and for the labourers--by
coöperating with the millionaires and labourers than they will by
striking against them or keeping their brains back.
They are in a position to make the millionaires see how little money
they can make without them even in a few days. They will let them try. A
very little trying will prove it.
Where hand labour would have to strike for weeks and months to prove its
value, brain labour would have to strike hours and days.
This is what is going to be done in modern business in one business at a
time, the brains insisting in each firm upon full control.
Then, of course, the firms that have the brains in most full control
will drive the firms in which brains are in less control out of
competition.
Then brains will spread from one business to another. The Managers,
Artists, and Organizers of the world will have formed at last a Brain
Syndicate, and they will put themselves in a position to determine in
their own interests and in the interests of society at large the terms
on which all men--all men who have no brains to put with their
money--shall be allowed to have the use of theirs. They will monopolize
the brain supply of the world.
Then they will act. Under our present régime money hires men; under the
régime of the Brain Syndicate men will hire money. Money--_i.e._, saved
up or canned labour, is going to be hired by Managers, Organizers, and
Engineers with as much discrimination and with as deep a study of its
efficiency, as new labour is hired. The millionaires are going to be
seen standing with their money bags and their little hats in their hands
like office boys asking for positions for their money before the doors
of the really serious and important men, the men who toil out the ideas
and the ways and the means of carrying out ideas--the men who do the
real work of the world, who see things that they want and see how to get
them--the men of imagination, the inventors of ideas, organizers of
facts, generals and engineers in human nature.
It is these men who are going to allow people who merely have
thoughtless labour and people who merely have thoughtless money to be
let in with them. The world's quarrel with the rich man is not his being
a rich man, but his being rich without brains, and its quarrel with the
poor labourer is not his being a poor labourer, but his being a poor
labourer without brains. The only way that either of these men can have
a chance to be of any value is in letting themselves be used by the man
who will supply them with what they lack. They will try to get this man
to see if he cannot think of some way of getting some good out of them
for themselves, and for others.
We have a Frederick Taylor for furnishing brains to labour.
We are going to have a Frederick Taylor to attend to the brain-supply of
millionaires, to idea-outfits for directors.
Every big firm is going to have a large group of specialists working on
the problem of how to make millionaires--its own particular millionaires
think, devising ways of keeping idle and thoughtless capitalists out of
the way. If the experts fail in making millionaires think, they may be
succeeded by experts in getting rid of them and in finding thoughtful
money, possibly made up of many small sums, to take their place.
The real question the Artist or Organizer is going to ask about any man
with capital will be, "Is it the man who is making the money valuable
and important or is it the money that is making this man important for
the time being and a little noticeable or important-looking?"
The only really serious question we have to face about money to-day is
the unimportance of the men who have it. The Hewers or Scoopers, or
Grabbers, who have assumed the places of the Artist and the Inventor
because they have the money, are about to be crowded over to the silent,
modest back seats in directors' meetings. If they want their profits,
they must give up their votes. They are going to be snubbed. They are
going to beg to be noticed. The preferred stock or voting stock will be
kept entirely in the hands of the men of working imagination, of
clear-headedness about things that are not quite seen, the things that
constitute the true values in any business situation, the men who have
the sense of the way things work and of the way they will have to go.
Mere millionaires who do not know their place in a great business will
be crowded into small ones. They will be confronted by the organized
refusal of men with brains to work for their inferiors, to be under
control of men of second-rate order. Men with mere owning and grabbing
minds will only be able to find men as stupid as they are to invest and
manage their money for them. In a really big creative business their
only chance will be cash and silence. They will be very glad at last to
get in on any terms, if the men of brains will let their money edge into
their business without votes and be carried along with it as a favour.
It is because things are not like this now, that we have an industrial
problem.
Managers who have already hired labour as a matter of course are going
to hire the kind of capital they like, the kind of capital that thinks
and that can work with thinking men.
There will gradually evolve a general recognition in business on the
part of men who run it and on the part of managers, of the moral or
human value of money. The successful manager is no longer going to grab
thoughtlessly at any old, idle, foolish pot of money that may be offered
to him. He is going to study the man who goes with it, see how he will
vote and see whether he knows his place, whether he is a Hewer, for
instance, who thinks he is an Inventor. Does he or does he not know
which he is, an Inventor, an Artist, or a Hewer?
Capitalists will expect as a matter of course to be looked over and to
be hired in a great business enterprise as carefully as labourers are
being hired now.
The moment it is generally realized that the managers of every big
modern business have become as particular about letting in the right
kind of directors as they have been before about letting in the right
kind of labour, we will stop having an upside-down business world.
An upside-down business world is one in which any man who has money
thinks he can be a director almost anywhere, a world in which on every
hand we find managers who are not touching the imagination of the public
and getting it to buy, and not touching the imagination of labour and
getting it to work, because they are not free to carry out their ideas
without submitting them to incompetent and scared owners.
The incompetent and scared owners--the men who cannot think--are about
to be shut out. Then they will be compelled to hire incompetent and
scared managers. Then they will lose their money. Then the world will
slip out of their hands.
The problem of modern industry is to be not the distribution of the
money supply, but the distribution of the man-supply.
Money follows men.
Free men. Free money.
BOOK FIVE
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
TO ANYBODY
"_I know that all men ever born are also my brothers....
Limitless leaves too, stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elders,
mulleins and poke weed._"
_A Child said, "What is grass?" fetching it to me with full hands.
How could I answer the Child?_
* * * * *
_"I want to trust the sky and the grass!
I want to believe the songs I hear from the fenceposts!
Why should a maple-bud mislead me?"_
PART ONE
NEWS AND LABOUR
A big New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get nearer its raw
material and moved to Georgia.
All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper labour,
smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for moving to Georgia.
Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes were moved in
and thousands of shanties were put up, and the men and the women stood
between the wheels. And the wheels turned.
There was not a thing that had not been thought of except the men and
women that stood between the wheels.
The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for the most part,
strong and hearty persons and they never looked anxious or abused and
did as they were told.
And when Saturday night came, crowds of them with their black faces, of
the men and of the women, of the boys and girls, might have been seen
filing out of the works with their week's wages.
Monday morning a few of them dribbled back. There were enough who would
come to run three mills. All the others in the long row of mills were
silent. Tuesday morning, Number Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five.
By Thursday noon they were all going.
The same thing happened the week after, and the week after, and the week
after that.
The management tried everything they could think of with their people,
scolding, discharging, making their work harder, making their work
easier, paying them less, paying them more, two Baptist ministers and
even a little Roman Catholic Church.
As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they would not
work.
It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to
Massachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people felt poor,
got up at 5 A.M. Mondays and worked.
Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-looking young
man who had never seen a business college, and who had run through
Harvard almost without looking at a book, and who really did not seem to
know or to care anything about anything--except folks--appeared on the
scene with orders from his father that he be set to work.
The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first, but finally,
being a boy who made people like him more than they ought to, he found
himself placed in charge of the Company Store. The company owned the
village, and the Company Store, which had been treated as a mere
necessity in the lonely village, had been located, or rather dumped, at
the time, into a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a
kind of extra storehouse on the premises.
The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in the
building, all along the front and around the corners on the two sides,
and put in four big plate-glass windows. The store was mysteriously
closed up in front for a few days to do this, and no one could see what
was happening, and the negroes slunk around into a back room to buy
their meal and molasses. And finally one morning, one Sunday morning,
the store opened up bravely and flew open in front.
The windows on the right contained three big purple hats with blue
feathers, and some pink parasols.
The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-headed
canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to.
Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual.
Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions, phonographs,
big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing machines, and Morris
chairs. Only a few hands took their Mondays off after this.
All the mills began running all the week.
* * * * *
Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats and blue
feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather shoes. But if
people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty days, or sixty days
ahead, instead of three days ahead, by purple hats and blue feathers and
white waistcoats, and if it is necessary to use purple hats and blue
feathers to start people thinking in months instead of minutes, or to
budge them over to where they can have a touch of idealism or of
religion or of living beyond the moment, I say for one, with all my
heart, "God bless purple hats and blue feathers!"
* * * * *
The great problem of modern charity, the one society is largely occupied
with to-day, is: "What is there that we can possibly do for our
millionaires?"
The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up
purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.
The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live
for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things
they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that
everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a
great business merely to make money. They will find it more interesting,
harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable
employers. When our millionaires once begin to enter into competition
with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of
labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease.
Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare,
and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small
values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such
stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because
they cannot really think of anything to live for.
Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much
less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more
money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such
things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they
cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working
for.
The industrial question is not an economic question. It is a question of
supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American
National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first
moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and
for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the
world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.
* * * * *
As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing
house--marking off rooms--sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of
stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big
stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on
it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up
a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought
would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for
them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that
night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had
given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone
for yards around--every one that was the right size--seemed subtly out
of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.
They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.
I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys'
first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off
for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!
I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a
crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I
know that a man with only three day's worth of things ahead to live for
does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is
doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to
live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and
inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer
lever still, with thirty or forty years worth' of things he wants, all
crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so
even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a
new size and a new kind of man.
* * * * *
The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man
more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business
man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee, knows how to give
him something or suggest something in his life that will make him want
to live twenty times as much, it would not only be cheaper, but it would
work better than paying him twice as much wages.
Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty times as
much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least, well--twice
as much work.
If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do three times
as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and keep doing, is seen
daily by him as a part of a big thing, the power and drive of the big
thing is in it, the little thing becomes the big thing, seems big while
he is doing it every minute. It makes it easier to do it because it
seems big.
The little man becomes a big man.
From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in
business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern business who
is the man of economic sense. The employer who can put out ideals in
front of his people, who can make his people efficient with the least
expense, is the employer who has the most economic sense.
The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people, who manages
to cut down through to the quick in his employees, to the daily motives,
to the hourly ideals, the hourly expectations with which they work, is
the employer who already takes the lead, who is already setting the pace
in the twentieth-century business world.
Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers or, at
least, in the great managers of employers?
You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop. As you move
down the long aisles of candy machines you hear the clock strike eleven.
Suddenly music starts up all around you and before your eyes four
hundred girls swing off into each other's arms. They dance between their
machines five minutes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work.
You see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-meats
with flushed and glowing cheeks.
Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?
The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient it is and
the better it works.
"Business is not business."
One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever else business
is, it is not business. It would be closer to the facts to call business
an art or a religion, a kind of homely, inspired, applied piety, based
upon gifts in men which are essentially religious gifts; the power of
communion in the human heart, the genius for cultivating companionship,
of getting people to understand you and understand one another and do
team work. The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success lies in the
fundamental, daily conviction--the personal habit in a man of looking
upon business as a hard, accurate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a
science of mutual expectation.
I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young women having
them, to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock, swing off into each other's
arms and dance for five minutes. The value of the dance in this
particular case was that the Firm thought of the dancing itself and was
always doing things like it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in
its glass office, felt glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed
seeing the girls caught up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a
big happy world full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and
gentle things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of which
they and their lives were a part.
When we admit that business success to-day turns or is beginning to turn
on a man's power of getting work out of people, we admit that a man's
power of getting work out of people, his business efficiency, turns on
his power of supplying his people with ideals.
Ideals are news.
You come on a man who thinks he is out of breath and that he cannot
possibly run. You happen to be able to tell him that some dynamite in
the quarry across the road is going to blow the side of the hill out in
forty-five seconds and he will run like a gazelle.
You tell a man the news, the true news that his employees are literally
and honestly finding increased pay or promotion, either in their own
establishment or elsewhere for every man they employ, as fast as he
makes himself fit, and you have created a man three times his own size
before your own eyes, all in a minute. And he begins working for you
like a man three times his own size, and not because he is getting more
for it, but because he suddenly believes in you, suddenly believes in
the world and in the human race he belongs to.
To make a man work, say something to him or do something to him which
will make him swing his hat for humanity, and give three cheers (like a
meeting of workmen the other day): "Three cheers for God!"
There is a well-known firm in England which has the best labour of its
kind in the world, because the moment the Firm finds that a man's skill
has reached the uttermost point in his work, where it would be to the
Firm's immediate interests to keep him and where the Firm could keep on
making money out of him and where the man could not keep on growing,
they have a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen
every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere, finding
him a better place and sending him to it. This is a regular system and
highly organized. The factory is known or looked upon as a big family or
school. There are hundreds of young men and young women who, in order to
get in and get started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory,
would offer to work for the firm for nothing. The Factory, to them, is
like a great Gate on the World.
It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.
And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a
man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.
And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature
to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves,
all day, every day, all the week, like a church--let such a factory, I
say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be
counted with the other churches!
People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind of weak,
pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls,
as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce,
splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history,
trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon
the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go. These
are ideals! This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a
year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they
make a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for, to
make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With the men who
are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead
and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as
an everyday matter of course.
I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what he lives for,
as his motive powers. They generally speak of motives in a man as if
they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or
clock-hand on him or map of his soul. The motives and desires in a man
are the motors or engines in him, the central power house in a man, the
thing in him that makes him go.
All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big life is to
have suddenly a big motive.
Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive, ever tried
working a little happiness for other people into what he is doing for
himself, for instance, if he stopped to think about it and how it worked
and how happy it made him himself, would never do anything in any other
way all his life. It is the big motives that are efficient.
PART TWO
NEWS AND MONEY
I think it was Sir William Lever who remarked (but I have heard in the
last two years so many pearls dropped from the lips of millionaires that
I am not quite sure) that the way to tell a millionaire, when one saw
one, was by his lack of ready money. He added that perhaps a surer way
of knowing a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of ideas.
My own experience is that neither of these ways works as well as it used
to. I very often meet a man now--a real live millionaire, no one would
think it of.
One of them--one of the last ones--telegraphed me from down in the
country one morning, swung up to London on a quick train, cooped me up
with him at a little corner table in his hotel, and gave me more ideas
in two hours than I had had in a week.
I came away very curious about him--whoever he was.
Not many days afterward I found myself motoring up a long, slow hill,
full of wind and heather, and there in a stately park with all his
treetops around him, and his own blue sky, in a big, beautiful, serene
room, I saw him again.
He began at once, "Do you think Christ would have approved of my house?"
His five grown sons were sitting around him but he spoke vividly and
directly and like a child, and as if he had just brushed sixty years
away, and could, any time.
I said I did not think it fair to Christ, two thousand years off, to ask
what he would have thought of a house like his, now. The only fair
thing to do would be to ask what Christ would think if He were living
here to-day.
"Well, suppose He had motored over here with you this afternoon from
---- Manor, and spent last night with you there, and talked with you and
with ---- and had seen the pictures, and the great music room and
wandered through the gardens, and suppose that then He had come through
on his way up, all those two miles of slums down in ---- seen all those
poor, driven, crowded people, and had finally come up here with you to
this big, still, restful place two thousand people could live in, and
which I keep all to myself. You don't really mean to say, do you, that
He would approve of my living in a house like this?"
I said that I did not think that Christ would be tipped over by a house
or lose his bearings with a human soul because he lived in a park. I
thought He would look him straight in the eyes.
"But Christ said, 'He that loseth his life shall save it!'"
"Yes, but He did not intend it as a mere remark about people's houses."
It did not seem to me that Christ meant simply giving up to other people
easy and ordinary things like houses or like money, but that He meant
giving up to others our motives, giving up the deepest, hardest things
in us, our very selves to other people.
"And so you really think that if Christ came and looked at this house
and looked at me in it, He would not mind?"
"I do not know. I think that after He had looked at your house He would
go down and look at your factory, possibly. How many men do you employ?"
"Sixteen hundred."
"I think He would look at them, the sixteen hundred men, and then He
would move about a little. Very likely He would look at their wives and
the little children."
He thought a moment. I could see that he was not as afraid of having
Christ see the factory as he was of having Him see the house.
I was not quite sure but I thought there was a little faint gleam in his
eye when I mentioned the factory.
"What do you make?" I asked.
He named something that everybody knows.
Then I remembered suddenly who he was. He was one of the men I had first
been told about in England, and the name had slipped from me. He had
managed to do and do together the three things one goes about looking
for everywhere in business--what might be called the Three R's of great
business (though not necessarily R's). (1) He had raised the wages of
his employees. (2) He had reduced prices to consumers. (3) He had
reduced his proportion of profit and raised the income of the works, by
inventing new classes of customers, and increasing the volume of the
business.
He had found himself, one day, as most men do, sooner or later, with a
demand for wages that he could not pay.
At first he told the men he could not pay them more, said that he would
have to close the works if he did.
He was a very busy man to be confronted with a crisis like this. The
market was trouble enough.
One morning, when he was up early, and the house was all still and he
was sitting alone with himself, the thought slipped into his mind that
there had been several times before in his life when he had sat thinking
about certain things that could not be done. And then he had got up from
thinking they could not be done and gone out and done them.
He wondered if he could not get up and go out and do this one.
As he sat in the stillness with a clear road before his mind and not a
soul in the world up, the thought occurred to him, with not a thing in
sight to stop it, that he had not really trained himself to be quite
such an expert in raising wages as he had in some other things.
Perhaps he did not know about raising wages.
Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting higher
wages for his workmen as he had in those early days years before on
making over all his obstinate raw material into the best cases of ----
on earth, he might find it possible to get more wages for his men by
persuading them to earn more and by getting their coöperation in finding
ways to earn more.
As he sat in the stillness, gradually (perhaps it was the stillness that
did it) the idea grew on him.
He made up his mind to see what would happen if he worked as hard at
paying higher wages for three months as he had for three years at making
raw material into cases of the best----on earth.
Then things began happening every day. One of the most important
happened to him.
He found that higher wages were as interesting a thing to work on as any
other raw material had ever been.
He found that a cheap workman as raw material to make a high-priced
workman out of was as interesting as a case of----.
A year or so after this, there was a strike (in his particular industry)
of all the workmen in England. They struck to be paid the wages his men
were paid.
He had been able to do three things he thought he thought he could not
do. He had succeeded in doing the first, in raising the wages of his
employees, by thinking up original ways of expressing himself to them,
and of getting them to believe in him and of making them want to work a
third harder. At the same time he succeeded in doing the second, in
reducing the prices to consumers, by inventing new by-products out of
waste.
He had succeeded in doing the third, in reducing his per cent. of
profits and increasing his income from the works at the same time, by
thinking up ways of creating new habits and new needs in his customers.
He had fulfilled, as it seems, the three requisites of a great business
career. He had created new workmen, invented new things for men and
women to want, and had then created some new men and women who could
want them.
Incidentally all the while, day by day, while he was doing these things,
he had distributed a large and more or less unexpected sum of money
among all these three classes of people.
Some of this extra money went to his workmen, and some to himself, and
some to his customers, but it was largely spent, of course, in getting
business for other manufacturers and in getting people to buy all over
England, from other manufacturers, things that such people as they had
never been able before to afford to buy.
* * * * *
All these things that I have been saying and which I have duly confided
to the reader flashed through my mind as I stood with my back to the
fire, realizing suddenly that the man who had done them was the man with
whom I was talking.
Possibly some little thing was said. I do not remember what. The next
thing I knew was that, with his five grown sons around him, he returned
to his attack on his house.
He said some days he was glad it was so far away. He did not want his
workmen to see it. He did not go to the mill often in his motor-car, not
when he could help it.
I said that I thought that a man who was doing extraordinary things for
other people, things that other men could not get time or strength or
freedom or boldness of mind or initiative to do, that any particular
thing he could have that gave him any advantage or immunity for doing
the extraordinary things better, that would give him more of a chance to
give other people a chance, that the other people, if they were in their
senses, would insist upon his having these things.
"I think there are hundreds of men in my mill who think that they ought
to have my motor-car and three or four rooms in this house."
"Are they the most efficient ones?"
"No."
If a man gives over to other people his deepest motives, and if he
really identifies himself--the very inside of himself with them and
treats their interests as his interests, the more money he has, the more
people like it.
"Take me, for instance," I said.
"I have hoped every minute since I knew you, that you were a prosperous
man. I saw the house and looked around in the park as I motored up with
joy. And when I came to the big gate I wanted to give three cheers! I
wish you had stock in the Meat Trust in America, that you could pierce
your way like a microbe into the vitals, into the inside of the Meat
Trust in my own country, make a stand in a Directors' Meeting for ninety
million people over there, say your say for them, vote your stock for
them, say how you want a Meat Trust you belong to, to behave, how you
want it to be a big, serious, business institution and not a humdrum,
mechanical-minded hold-up anybody could think of--in charge of a few
uninteresting, inglorious men--men nobody really cares to know and that
nobody wants to be like ... when I think of what a man like you with
money can do ...!
"Am I not tired every day, are you not tired, yourself, of going about
everywhere and seeing money in the hands of all these second-class,
socially feeble-minded men, of seeing columns in the papers of what such
men think, of having college presidents, great universities, domes,
churches and thousands of steeples all deferring to them and bowing to
them, and all the superior, live, interested people ringing their door
bells for their money waiting outside on benches for what they think?"
I do not believe that Christ came into the world, two thousand years
ago, to say that only the men who have minds of the second class, men
who are not far-sighted enough in business to be decently unselfish in
this world, should be allowed to have control of the money and of the
peoples' means of living in it.
We are living in an age of big machines and big, inevitable
aggregations, and to say in an age like this, and above all, to get it
out of a Bible, or put it into a hymn book or make a religion of it,
that all the first class minds of the world--the men who see far enough
to be unselfish, should give over their money to second-class men, is
the most monstrous, most unbelieving, unfaithful, unbiblical,
irreligious thing a world can be guilty of. The one thing that is now
the matter with money, is that the second-class people have most of it.
"What would happen if we applied asceticism or a tired, discouraged
unbelief to having children that we do to having pounds and pence and
dollars and cents? You would not stand for that would you?"
I looked at his five sons.
"Suppose all the good families of to-day were to take the ground that
having children is a self-indulgence unworthy of good people; suppose
the good people leave having children in this world almost entirely to
bad ones?
"This is what has been happening to money.
"Unbelief in money is unbelief in the spirit. It is paying too much
attention to wealth to say that one must or that one must not have it."
I cannot recall precisely what was said after this in that long evening
talk of ours but what I tried to say perhaps might have been something
like this:
The essence of the New Testament seems to be the emphasis of a man's
spirit with or without money. Whether a man should be rich or get out of
being rich and earn the right to be poor (which some very true and big
men, artists and inventors in this world will always prefer) turns on a
man's temperament. If a man has a money genius and can so handle money
that he can make money, and if he can, at the same time, and all in one
bargain, express his own spirit, if he can free the spirits of other men
with money and express his religion in it, he should be ostracized by
all thoughtful, Christian people, if in the desperate crisis of an age
like this, he tries to get out of being rich.
The one thing a man can be said to be for in this world, is to express
the goodness--the religion in him, in something, and if he is not the
kind of man who can express his religion in money and in employing
labour, then let him find something--say music or radium or painting in
which he can. It is this bounding off in a world, this making a bare
spot in life and saying "This is not God, this cannot be God!"--it is
this alone that is sacriligious.
* * * * *
It may be that I am merely speaking for myself, but I did discover a man
on Fleet Street the other day who quite agreed with me apparently, that
if the thing a man has in him is religion he can put it up or express it
in almost anything.
This man had tried to express his idea in a window.
He had done a Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," in sugar--a kind of
bas-relief in sugar.
I do not claim that this kind of foolish, helpless caricature of a great
spiritual truth filled me with a great reverence or that it does now.
But it did make me think how things were.
If sugar with this man, like money with a banker, was the one logical
thing the man had to express his religion in, or if what he had had to
express had been really true and fine, or if there had been a true or
fine or great man to express, I do not doubt sugar could have been made
to do it.
One single man with enough money and enough religions skill in human
nature, who would get into the Sugar Trust with some good, fighting,
voting stock, who could make the Sugar Trust do as it would be done by,
would make over American industry in twenty years.
He would have thrown up as on a high mountain, before all American men,
one great specimen, enviable business. He would have revealed as in a
kind of deep, sober apocalypse, American business to itself. He would
have revealed American business as a new national art form, as an
expression of the practical religion, the genius for real things, that
is our real modern temperament in America and the real modern
temperament in all the nations.
Of course it may not need to be done precisely with the Sugar Trust.
The Meat Trust might do it first, or the Steel Trust.
But it will be done.
Then the Golden Rule, one great Golden Rule-machine having been
installed in our trust that knew the most, and was most known, it could
be installed in the others.
Religion can be expressed much better to-day in a stock-holder's meeting
than it can in a prayer-meeting.
Charles Cabot, of Boston, walked in quietly to the Stock-holder's
Meeting of the Steel Trust one day and with a little touch of
money--$2,900 in one hand, and a copy of the _American Magazine_ in the
other, made (with $2,900) $1,468,000,000 do right.
PART THREE
NEWS AND GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER I
OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
Every now and then when I am in London (at the instigation of some
business man who takes the time off to belong to it), I drop into a
pleasant but other-worldly and absent-minded place called the House of
Commons.
I sit in the windows in the smoking-room and watch the faces of the
members all about me and watch the steamships, strangely, softly,
suddenly--Shakespeare and Pepys, outside on the river, slip gravely by
under glass.
Or I go in and sit down under the gallery, face to face with the
Speaker, looking across those profiles of world-makers in their seats;
and I watch and listen in the House itself. There is a kind of pleasant,
convenient, appropriate hush upon the world there.
Wisdom.
The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one--one listens
to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt of words.
Every now and then one sees a member in the middle of a speech, or
possibly in the middle of a sentence, slip up quietly and take a look
(under glass) at The People, or he uses a microscope, perhaps, or a
reading glass on The People, Mr. Bonar Law's, Mr. Lloyd George's, Ramsay
MacDonald's, Will Crook's, or somebody's. Then he comes back gravely as
if he had got the people attended to now, and finishes what he was
saying.
It is a very queer feeling one has about the People in the House of
Commons.
I mean the feeling of their being under glass; they all seem so
manageable, so quiet and so remote, a kind of glazed-over picture in
still life, of themselves. Every now and then, of course one takes a
member seriously when he steps up to the huge showcase of specimen
crowds, which members are always referring to in their speeches. But
nothing comes of it.
The crowds seem very remote there under the glass. One feels like
smashing something--getting down to closer terms with them--one longs
for a Department Store or a bridge or a 'bus--something that rattles and
bangs and is.
All the while outside the mighty street--that huge megaphone of the
crowd, goes shouting past. One wishes the House would notice it. But no
one does. There is always just the House Itself and that hush or ring of
silence around it, all England listening, all the little country papers
far away with their hands up to their ears and the great serious-minded
Dailies, and the witty Weeklies, the stately Monthlies, and Quarterlies
all acting as if it mattered....
Even during the coal strike nothing really happened in the House of
Commons. There was a sense of the great serious people, of the crowds on
Westminster Bridge surging softly through glass outside, but nothing got
in. Big Ben boomed down the river, across the pavements, over the
hurrying crowds and over all the men and the women, the real business
men and women. The only thing about the House that seemed to have
anything to do with anybody was Big Ben.
Finally one goes up to Harrod's to get relief, or one takes a 'bus, or
one tries Trafalgar Square, or one sees if one can really get across the
Strand or one does something--almost anything to recall one's self to
real life.
And then, of course, there is Oxford Street.
Almost always after watching the English people express themselves or
straining to express themselves in the House of Commons, I try Oxford
Street.
I know, of course, that as an art-form for expressing a great people,
Oxford Street is not all that it should be, but there is certainly
something, after all the mooniness and the dim droniness, and
lawyer-mindedness in the way the English people express themselves or
think that they ought to express themselves in their house of
Commons--there is certainly something that makes Oxford Street seem
suddenly a fine, free, candid way for a great people to talk! And there
is all the gusto, too, the 'busses, the taxies, the hundreds of
thousands of men and women saying things and buying things they believe.
Taking in the shops on both sides or the street, and taking in the
things the people are doing behind the counters, and in the aisles, and
up in the office windows three blocks of Oxford Street really express
what the English people really want and what they really think and what
they believe and put up money on, more than three years of the house of
Commons.
If I were an Englishman I would rather be elected to walk up and down
Oxford Street and read what I saw there than to be elected to a seat in
the House of Commons, and I could accomplish more and learn more for a
nation, with three blocks of Oxford Street, with what I could gather up
and read there, and with what I could resent and believe there, than I
could with three years of the House of Commons.
I know that anybody, of course, could be elected to walk up and down
Oxford Street. But it is enough for me.
So I almost always try it after the house of Commons.
And when I have taken a little swing down Oxford Street and got the
House of Commons out of my system a little, perhaps I go down to the
Embankment, and drop into my club.
Then I sit in the window and mull.
If the English people express themselves and express what they want and
what they are bound to have, on Oxford Street and put their money down
for it, so much better than they do in the House of Commons, why should
they not do it there?
Why should elaborate, roundabout, mysterious things like governments,
that have to be spoken of in whispers (and that express themselves
usually in a kind of lawyer-minded way, in picked and dried words like
wills), be looked upon so seriously, and be taken on the whole, as the
main reliance the people have, in a great nation, for expressing
themselves?
Why should not a great people be allowed to say what they are like and
to say what they want and what they are bound to get, in the way Oxford
Street says things, in a few straight, clean-cut, ordinary words, in
long quiet rows of deeds, of buying and selling and acting?
Pounds, shillings, and silence.
Then on to the next thing.
If the House of Commons were more like Oxford Street or even if it had
suddenly something of the tone of Oxford Street, if suddenly it were to
begin some fine morning to express England the way Oxford Street does,
would not one see, in less than three months, new kinds and new sizes of
men all over England, wanting to belong to it?
Big, powerful, uncompromising, creative men who have no time for
twiddling, who never would have dreamed of being tucked away in the
house of Commons before, would want to belong to it.
In the meantime, of course, the men of England who have empires to
express, are not unnaturally expressing them in more simple language
like foundries, soap factories around a world, tungsten mines,
department stores, banks, subways, railroads for seventy nations, and
ships on seven seas, Winnipeg trolleys and little New York skyscrapers.
Business men of the more usual or humdrum kind could not do it, but
certainly, the first day that business men like these, of the first or
world-size class, once find the House of Commons a place they like to be
in, once begin expressing the genius of the English people in government
as they are already expressing the genius of the English people in
owning the earth, in buying and selling, in inventing things and in
inventing corporations, the House of Commons will cease to be a bog of
words, an abyss of committees, and legislation will begin to be run like
a railroad--on a block signal system, rows of things taken up, gone
over, and finished. The click of the signal. Then the next thing.
I sit in my club and look out of the window and think. Just outside
thousands of taxies shooting all these little mighty wills of men across
my window, across London, across England, across the world ... the huge,
imperious street ... all these men hurling themselves about in it,
joining their wills on to telephone wires, to mighty trains and little
quiet country roads, hitching up cables to their wills, and
ships--hitching up the very clouds over the sea to their wills and
running a world--why are not men like these--men who have the
street-spirit in them, this motor genius of driving through to what they
want, taking seats in the House of Commons?
Perhaps Oxford Street is more efficient and more characteristic in
expressing the genius and the will of the English people than the House
of Commons is because of the way in which the people select the men they
want to express them in Oxford Street.
It may be that the men the people have selected to be at the top of the
nation's law-making are not selected by as skillful, painstaking, or
thorough a process as the men who have been selected to be placed at the
top of the nation's buying and selling.
Possibly the reason the House of Commons does not express the will of
the people is, that its members are merely selected in a loose, vague
way and by merely counting noses.
Possibly, too, the men who are selected by a true, honest, direct,
natural selection to be the leaders and to free the energies and steer
the work of the people, the men who are selected to lead by being seen
and lived with and worked with all day, every day, are better selected
men than men who having been voted on on slips of paper, and having been
seen in newspaper paragraphs, travel up to London and begin
thoughtlessly running a world.
The business man drops into the House of Commons after the meeting of
his firm in Bond Street, Lombard Street, or Oxford Street and takes a
look at it. He sees before him a huge tool or piece of machinery--a body
of men intended to work together and to get certain grave, particular,
and important things done, that the people want done, and he does not
see how a great good-hearted chaos or welter, a kind of chance national
Weather of Human Nature like the House of Commons, can get the things
done.
So he confines himself more and more to business where he loses less
time in wondering what other people think or if they think at all, cuts
out the work he sees, and does it.
He thinks how it would be if things were turned around and if people
tried to get expressed in business in the loose way, the thoughtless
reverie of voting that they use in trying to get themselves expressed in
politics.
He thinks the stockholders of the Sunlight Soap Company, Limited, would
be considerably alarmed to have the president and superintendent and
treasurer and the buyers and salesmen of the company elected at the
polls by the people in the county or by popular suffrage. He thinks that
thousands of the hands as well as the stockholders would be alarmed too.
It does not seem to him that anybody, poor or rich, employer or
employee, in matters of grave personal concern, would be willing to
trust his interest or would really expect the people, all the people as
a whole, to be represented or to get what they wanted, to act definitely
and efficiently through the vague generalizations of the polls. Perhaps
a natural selection, a dead-earnest rigorous, selection that men work
on nine hours a day, an implacable, unremitting process during working
hours, of sorting men out (which we call business), is the crowd's most
reliable way of registering what it definitely thinks about the men it
wants to represent it. Business is the crowd's, big, serious, daily
voting in pounds, shillings, and pence--its hour to hour, unceasing,
intimate, detailed labour in picking men out, in putting at the top the
men it can work with best, the men who most express it, who have the
most genius to serve crowds, to reveal to crowds their own minds, and
supply to them what they want.
As full as it is--like all broad, honest expressions, of human
shortcomings and of things that are soon to be stopped, it does remain
to be said that business, in a huge, rough way, daily expressing the
crowds as far as they have got--the best in them and the worst in them,
is, after all, their most faithful and true record, their handwriting.
Business is the crowds' autograph--its huge, slow, clumsy signature upon
our world.
Buying and selling is the life blood of the crowds' thought, its big,
brutal daily confiding to us of its view of human life. What do the
crowds, poor and rich, really believe about life? Property is the last
will and testament of Crowds.
The man-sorting that goes on in distributing and producing property is
the Crowd's most unremitting, most normal, temperamental way of
determining and selecting its most efficient and valuable leaders--its
men who can express it, and who can act for it.
This is the first reason I would give against letting the people rely on
having a House of Commons compel business men to be good.
Men who meet now and again during the year, afternoons or evenings, who
have been picked out to be at the top of the nation's talking, by a
loose absent-minded and illogical paper-process, cannot expect to
control men who have been picked out to be at the top of a nation's
buying and selling, by a hard-working, closely fitting, logical
process--the men that all the people by everything they do, every day,
all day, have picked out to represent them.
Any chance three blocks of Oxford Street could be relied on to do
better.
Keeping the polls open once in so often, a few hours, and using hearsay
and little slips of paper--anybody dropping in--seems a rather fluttery
and uncertain way to pick out the representatives of the people, after
one has considered three blocks of Oxford Street.
The next thing the crowd is going to do in getting what it wants from
business men is to deal directly with the business men themselves and
stop feeling, what many people feel partly from habit, perhaps, that the
only way the crowd can get to what it wants is to go way over or way
back or way around by Robin Hood's barn or the House of Commons.
But there is a second reason:
The trouble is not merely in the way men who sit in the House of Commons
are selected. The real deep-seated trouble with the men who sit in the
House of Commons is that they like it. The difficulty (as in the
American Congress too) seems to be something in the men themselves. It
lies in what might be called, for lack of a better name, perhaps, the
Hem and Haw or Parliament Temperament.
The dominating type of man in all the world's legislative bodies, for
the time being, seems to be the considerer or reconsiderer, the man who
dotes on the little and tiddly sides of great problems. The greatness of
the problem furnishes, of course, the pleasant, pale glow, the happy
sense of importance to a man, and then there is all the jolly littleness
of the little things besides--the little things that a little man can
make look big by getting them in the way of big ones--a great nation
looking on and waiting.... For such a man there always seems to be a
certain coziness and hominess in a Legislative Body....
As a seat in the House of Commons not unnaturally--every year it is
hemmed or hawed in, gets farther and farther away from the people, it is
becoming more and more apparent to the people every year that the
Members of their House of Commons as a class are unlikely to do anything
of a very striking or important or lasting value in the way of getting
business men to be good.
The more efficient and practical business men are coming to suspect that
the members of the House of Commons, speaking broadly, do not know the
will of the people, and that they could not express it in creative,
straightforward and affirmative laws if they did.
CHAPTER II
OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS
But it is not only because the members of the House of Commons are
selected in a vague way or because they are a vague kind of men, that
they fail to represent the people.
The third reason against having a House of Commons try to compel
business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way position.
The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in getting
business men to be good, can be best considered, perhaps, by admitting
at the outset that a government really is one very real and genuine way
a great people may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what
they are like and what they want, and that business is another way.
Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing the people is
the one that expresses them the most to the point, and which expresses
them where their being expressed counts the most?
The people have a Government. And the people have Business.
What is a Government for?
What is Business for?
Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating what the
wants of the English people really are and of finding out ways of
supplying them.
The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty thousand men and
women, keep them at work eight or nine hours a day, five or six days in
a week, finding out what the things are that the English people want
and reporting on them and supplying them.
They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not only what
kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too, just how they
want the things placed before them, what kind of storekeepers and
manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen they tolerate, like to deal with
and prefer to have prosper.
And the business men are not only in the most strategic and competent
position to find out what the people who buy want, but to find out too,
what the people who sell want. They are in the best position to know,
and to know intimately, what the salesmen and saleswomen want and what
they want to be and what they want to do or not do.
They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard to the
conditions in the factories from which their goods come and with regard
to what the employers, stockholders, foremen and workmen in those
factories want.
What is more to the point, these same business men, when they have once
found out just what it is the people want, are the only men who are in a
position, all in the same breath, without asking anybody and without
arguing with anybody, without meddling or convincing anybody--to get it
for them.
Finding out what people want and getting it for them is what may be
called, controlling business.
The question not unnaturally arises with all these business men and
their twenty or thirty thousand people working with them, eight or nine
hours a day, five or six days a week, in controlling business, why
should the members of the House of Commons expect, by taking a few
afternoons or evenings off for it, to control business for them?
If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to improve the
conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not think I would want to
take the time to wait several months, probably, to convince my member of
Parliament, and then wait a few months more for him to convince the
other members of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather
deal directly with my employer.
If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the attention of my
employer himself, as to where he is and as to how he is interrupting
what I am doing for him--if I once get his attention and once get him to
notice my back, he can get down. No one else can get down for him and no
one else, except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him get
down. Why should a man bother with T.P.'s _Weekly_ or with Horatio
Bottomley or with the _Daily Mail_ or the _Times_, with a score of other
people's by-elections all over England to lift his own employer off his
back?
There is a very simple rule for it.
The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make one's back so
efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.
The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not persuade my
employer to take steps to train me and to make me efficient, himself.
And perhaps the second thing I would try to do would be to wake my
trades union up, to get my trades union to consent to let me want to try
to be efficient and work as hard as I can, or to consent to my
employer's hiring engineers to make me efficient. I would try to get my
trades union to be interested in hiring itself some special expert like
Frederick Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much
work with the same strength, making him three times as valuable for his
employer and three times as fit and strong for himself.
This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer good. I would be
so good that he could not afford not being good too.
If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood human nature,
and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and
wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard
for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a
normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the
House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would
be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with
more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And
I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural
counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve
it. I could do it quietly by myself.
In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for
every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one
else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he
is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the
sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n-th power, in what might
be called a kind of larger syndicalism.
The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will
take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves,"
is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories
ourselves."
What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national
confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work
to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation,
begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the
factories?
What is true of employers and employees in factories is still more true
of the employers and employees in the great retail stores. If there is
one thing rather than another the business men and women on Oxford
Street, the managers, floor walkers and clerks all up and down the
street are really engaged in all day all their lives, it is what might
be called a daily nine-hour drill in understanding people. Why should
employers and employees like these--experts in human nature--men who
make their profession a success by studying human nature, and by working
in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from the House of Commons
and expect them to work out their human problems better than they can do
it?
Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all
the world most competent to study together the working details of human
nature, to act for themselves in self-respecting man-fashion and without
whining at a nation.
Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they want from, could
know more about human nature than they do? Are they not the men of all
others, all up and down that little strip of Oxford Street, who devote
their entire time to human nature? They are in the daily profession of
knowing the soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and
about what people will probably think. They are intimate with their
peccadillos in what they want to wear and in what they want to eat; they
have learned their likes and dislikes in human nature; they know what
they will support and what they will defy in human nature, in clerks,
and in stores, and in storekeepers.
And these things that they have learned about human nature (in
themselves and other people) they have learned not by talking about
human nature but by a grim daily doing things with it.
These things being so, it would almost seem that these people and people
like them were qualified to act, and as they happen to be in the one
strategic position, both employers and employees alike, to act and to
act for themselves and act directly and act together, it will not be
very long, probably, before the nation will be very glad to have them do
it.
It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour and
all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and crying "Help!"
and calling in some third person to settle family difficulties that can
be better settled by being faced and thought out in private, is an
inefficient and incompetent thing to do.
And for the most part it is going to be only in the more superficial,
inefficient, thoughtless industry that men, either employers or
employed, will be inclined to leave their daily work, run out wildly and
drag in a House of Commons to help them to do right.
I am only speaking for myself but certainly if I were an employer or an
employee, I would not want to wait for an election a year away or to
wait for the great engineering problem of compelling my member of
Parliament by my one vote to act for me.
Perhaps workingmen in England and America are deceived about the value
of voting as a means of improving conditions of workingmen. Possibly
women are deceived about the value of voting as a means of improving the
conditions of working women.
Possibly a woman could do more behind a counter or by buying a store
than by voting to have some man she has read about in a paper, improve
business by talking about it in the House of Commons.
* * * * *
There is also a kind of program or vision of action one can use as a
customer as well as an employer or employee.
I might speak for myself.
I have about so much money I spend every year in buying things. I have
proposed to study with my money every firm on which I spend it. I
propose to take away my trade from the firm that does the least as it
should and give it to the firm that does the most as it should. I will
vote with my entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of
employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of employers who
can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep the kind of salesmen and
saleswomen I choose to do business with.
All the year round, every firm with which I deal, I am going to study
not only with my mind but with my money. I will proceed to take my
trade away from the big employers who think that I want shoddy goods or
who think that I want or am willing to trade with saleswomen who would
let an employer impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford
to impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with every penny I
have in the world, and I will earn more that I may vote more, for the
kind of employer with whom I like to trade. And there shall not be a
man, woman, or child of my acquaintance, if I can help it, or of my
family's acquaintance who shall not know who these employers are by name
and by address, the employers that I will trade with and the employers
that I will not.
This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public, of the way for
a people to express itself and to get what it wants.
What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about me so far as I
go, as one member of the public. As I am only one person every item of
the news about me must be put where it works. I will deal directly with
the news of what I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of
Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can give it to me
when they know it.
News is the real government now and always of this world.
When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, obviously the best
art-form for telling news to employers and business men--the news of
what we want and what we do not want and of what we want in them as well
as in the things they sell, is to tell them the news in the language
they have studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars,
and cents, and by trading somewhere else.
The gospel-bearing value, the news that one can get into a man's mind
with one dollar, the news that he can be made to see and act on for one
dollar--well, thinking of this some days, makes for me, at least, going
up and down the Main Street of the World feeling my purse snuggling in
my pocket, and all the people I can step up to with my purse and tell
so many dollars' worth of news to, tell that dollar's worth of gospel to
about the world--makes going up and down with a dollar on a big business
street, and spending it or not spending it, feel like a kind of chronic,
easy, happy, going to Church. One always has a little money in one's
pocket that one spends or that one won't spend, and sometimes even not
spending a dollar, practised by some people, at just the right moment
and in just the right way, can be made to mean as much and do as much
with a world as spending a thousand dollars would without any meaning
put into it.
Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind of store I
know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them look a minute at
the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk out with it quietly.
I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall circulate in my
money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion, my gospel or news
for this world, news about what I want and about what I will have in a
world, if I cannot make every dollar, every shilling I earn, go through
the world and sing my own little world-song in it, may I never have
another shilling or earn another dollar as long as I live!
The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once more, fills me
with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what a bargain it is and how
I can use it twice over, thinking of the dollar's worth of news, to say
nothing of the dollar's worth of things that belong with a dollar!
* * * * *
For some generations, now, we have tried to make people good in a vague,
general way, by using priests, sacraments and confessional boxes. For
some centuries we have been trying to make people good with lawyers and
juries and ballot boxes. We are now to try, at last, religion or gospel
or news or ideals--practical, shrewd aimed ideals, that is, news to a
man about himself or news about the man from the man himself to us. In
everything a man does he is expressing to us this news about himself,
and about his world, and about his God. We are all telling news about
the world and about ourselves all the time and we are all in a position
for news all the time.
What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do and we will
not do?
This news about us is the religion in us.
The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of late as to just
where his religion is located. He has come to see that real religion in
a man, very conveniently located (immediately at hand in him and
personally directed), is his own action, his own divine "I will" or "I
won't."
He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion for every
man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully, to just where he
is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical, good-natured,
godlike "I will" and "I won't "--or News about himself.
CHAPTER III
PRESIDENT WILSON AND MOSES
We are deeply interested in the United States just now, in seeing what
will be the fate of President Wilson's government in getting men to be
good. The fate of a government in 1913 may be said to stand on the
government's psychology or knowledge of human nature or of what might be
called human engineering, its mastery of the principles of lifting over
in great masses heavy spiritual bodies, like people, swinging great
masses of people's minds over as on some huge national derrick up on The
White House, from one lookout on life to another.
There are certain aspects of human nature when power is being applied to
it in this way, and when it is being got to be good, that may not be
beside the point.
If one could drop in on a government and have a little neighbourly chat
with it, as one was going by, I think I would rather talk with it
(especially our government, just now), about Human Nature than about
anything.
I would have to do it, of course, in what might seem to a government to
be a plain and homely way.
I would ask the government what it thought of two or three observations
I have come to lately about the way that human nature works, when people
are getting it to be good. What a government thinks about them might
possibly prove before many months to be quite important to It.
The first observation is this:
The reason that the average bachelor is a bachelor is that he spends the
first forty-five years of his life in picking out women he will not
marry.
Possibly it is because many people are following the same principle in
trying to be good and in getting other people to be good that they make
such poor work of it.
Possibly the main reason why there are so many wicked people or seem to
be, in proportion, among the Hebrews in the Old Testament, is that Moses
was a lawyer and that he tried to start off a great people with the Ten
Commandments, that is, a list of nine things they must never do any
more, and of one that they must.
Some of us who have tried being good, have noticed that when we have hit
it off, being good (at least with us) consists in being focused, in
getting concentrated, in getting one's attention to what one really
wants to do.
Moses' idea when he started his government, the idea of getting people
concentrated on not getting concentrated on nine things, was not
conducive to goodness. The fundamental principle Moses tried to make the
people good with was a contradiction in terms. It is a principle that
would make wicked people out of almost anybody. It is not a practicable
principle for a government to rely on in getting people to be good. It
did not work with the people in the Old Testament and it has never
worked with people since.
It does not call people out, in getting them to take up goodness, to
point out to them nine places not to take hold of and one where they
will be allowed to take hold, if they know how.
All that one has to do to see how true this is, is to observe the groups
or classes of people who are especially not what they should be. The
people who never get on morally (as different as they may be in most
things and in the fields of their activity) all have one illusion in
common. There is one thing they always keep saying when any new hopeful
person tries once more to get them to be good.
They say (almost as if they had a phonograph) that they try to be good
and cannot do it.
And this is not true.
When a man says he tries to be good and cannot do it, if he sits down
and thinks it over he finds, generally, he is not trying to be good at
all. He is trying to be not bad.
A man cannot get himself reformed, by a negative process, by being not
bad, and it is still harder for him and for everybody, when other people
try to do it--those who are near him, and it is still, still harder for
a President down in Washington to do it.
An intelligent, live man or business corporation cannot be got to keep
up an interest very long in being not bad. Being not bad is a glittering
generality. It is like being not extravagant or economical.
Most people who have ever tried to attain in a respectable degree to a
pale little neuter virtue like economy, and who have reflected upon
their experiences, have come to conclusions that may not be very far
from the point in a fine art like getting one's self to be good or
getting other people to be good.
To concentrate on being economical by going grimly down the street,
looking at the shop windows, looking hard at miles of things one will
not buy, cannot be said to be a practicable method of attaining economy.
The real artist, in getting himself to be good, proceeds to upon the
opposite principle. Even if the good thing he tries for is merely a
negative good thing like economy, he instinctively seeks out some
positive way of getting it.
A man who is cultivating the art of getting himself to be economical, or
of getting his wife to be economical, does not make a start by sitting
down with a pencil and making out a list, by concentrating his mind on
rows of things that he and his family must get along without. He knows a
better way. He goes downtown with his entire family, takes them into a
big shop and sits down with them and listens to a Steinway Grand he
cannot get. As he listens to it long enough, he thinks he will get it.
Then a subtle, spiritual change passes over him and over his family
while they listen. He would not have said before he started that sitting
down and thinking of things he could get along without--making lists in
his mind of things that he must not have--could ever be in this world a
happy, even an almost thrilling experience. But as a matter of fact, as
he sits by the piano and listens, he finds himself counting off
economies like strings of pearls, and he greets each new self-sacrifice
he can think of with a cheer. While the Steinway Grand fills the room
with melody all around him, there he actually is sitting, and having the
time of his life dreaming of the things he can get along without!
When he goes home, he goes home thinking. And the family all go home
thinking.
Then economy sets in. The reason most people make a failure of their
economy is that they are not artistic with it, they do not enjoy it.
They do not pick out anything to enjoy their economy with.
With some people an automobile would work better than a Steinway Grand
and there are as many ways, of course, of practising the Steinway Grand
principle in not being bad as there are people, but they all consist
apparently in selecting some big, positive thing that one wants to do,
which logically includes and bundles all together where they are
attended to in a lump, all the things that one ought not to do.
Most sins (every one who has ever tried them knows this) most sins are
not really worth bothering with, each in detail, even the not-doing them
and the most practical, firm method of getting them out of the way
(thousands of them at once, sometimes, with one hand) is to have
something so big to live for that all the things that would like to get
in the way, and would like to look important, look, when one thinks of
it, suddenly small.
The distinctive, preëminent, official business for the next four years,
of making small things in this country look small and of gently,
quietly making small men feel small, has been assigned by our people
recently, to Mr. Woodrow Wilson.
Now it naturally seems to some of us, the best way for Mr. Wilson's
government to do in getting the Trusts to give up lying and stealing, is
going to be to place before them quietly a few really big, interesting,
equally exciting things that Trusts can do, and then dare them, as in
some great game or tournament of skill--all the people looking on--dare
them, challenge them like great men, to do them.
There are three ideas President Wilson may have of the government's
getting people to be good.
First, not letting people be bad. (Moses.)
Second, being good for them. (Karl Marx.)
Third, letting them be good themselves. (Any Democrat.)
The first of these ideas means government by Prison. The second, means
government by Usurpation, that is, the moment a man amounts to enough to
choose to do right or do wrong of his own free will, the moment he is a
man, in other words, being so afraid of him and of his being a man, that
we all, in a kind of panic, shove into his life and live it for
him--this is Socialism, a scared machine that scared people have
invented for not letting people choose to do right because they may
choose to do wrong.
The third, letting people be good themselves, letting them be
self-controlling, self-respecting, self-expressing or voluntarily good
people, is democracy, a machine for letting men be men by trying it.
Moses was the inventor of a kind of national moral-brake system, a
machine for stopping people nine times out of ten. The question that
faces President Wilson just now, while the world looks on is, "Is a
government or is it not a moral-brake system--a machine for stopping
people nine times out of ten?"
There is a considerable resemblance between Moses' position and the new
President's in the United States. When Moses looked around on the things
he saw the men around him doing, and took the ground that at least nine
out of ten of the things should be stopped, he was academically correct.
And so, also, President Wilson, gazing at the business of this country
to-day, at nine out of ten of the humdrum thoughtless things that trusts
and corporations have been doing, will be academically correct in
telling them to stop, in having his little, new, helpless, unproved,
adolescent government stand up before all the people and speak in loud,
beautiful, clear accents and (with its left fist full of prisons, fines,
lawyers, of forty-eight legislatures all talking at once) bring down its
right fist as a kind of gavel on the world and say to these men, before
all the nations, that nine of the things they are doing must be stopped
and that one of the things, if they happen to able be to think out some
way of keeping on doing it--nobody will hurt them.
But the question before President Wilson, to-day, with all our world
looking on, is not whether he would be right in entering upon a career
of stopping people. The real and serious question is, does stopping
people stop them? And if stopping people does not stop them, what will?
Perhaps the way for a government to stop people from doing things they
are doing, is to tell them the things it wants done. A government that
does not express what it wants, that has not given a masterful, clear,
inspired statement of what it wants--a government that has only tried to
say what it does not want, is not a government.
The next business of a government is a statement of what it wants.
The problem of a government is essentially a problem of statement.
How shall this statement be made?
CHAPTER IV
THE PRESIDENT SAYS YES AND NO
It was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but
because it was abstract that David found it so hard to keep. If the
seventh commandment (like Uriah's wife) could have had deep blue eyes or
could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a
particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have
found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue
of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little further in moral
evolution, than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and
it was further toward the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real
artist or man who does things.
One of the things about the real artist that makes him an artist, is
that he is always and always has been and always will be profoundly
dissatisfied with a statue of a female figure as an emblem of purity. He
challenges the world, he challenges God, he challenges himself, he
challenges the men and women about him when he is being put off with a
Statue as an emblem of purity. He demands, searches out, interprets,
creates something concrete and living to express his idea of purity.
How can President Wilson, in getting the Trusts not to be corrupt, in
trying to win them--how can President Wilson make the law alluring? How
can he make the People have a Low Voice?
A great deal if not nearly everything depends in tempting business men
to be good, upon the tone in which they are addressed. Every government,
like every man, soon comes to have its own characteristic tone in
addressing the people. And, as a matter of fact, it is almost always the
tone in a government, like the voice in a man, which tells us the most
definitely what it is like, and is the most intimate and effective
expression of what it wants and is the most practical way of getting
what it wants. Everybody has noticed that a man's voice works harder for
him, works more to the point for him in getting what he wants than his
words do. It is his voice that makes people know him, that makes them
know he means what he says. It is his voice that tells them whether he
is in the habit of meaning what he says, and it is his voice that tells
them whether he is in habit of getting what he wants, and of knowing
what to do with what he wants when he gets it.
A government does not need to say very much if it has the right tone.
The tone of a government is the government.
If President Wilson is going to succeed in tempting business men to be
good, he is going to do it, some of us think, by depending on three
principles.
These three principles, like all live, active principles, may be stated
as three principles or as three personal traits.
First, by being affirmative. (Isaiah, in distinction from Moses.)
Second, by being concrete. (Bathsheba.)
Third, by being specific, by seeing the universal in the particular.
(Like any artist or man who does things.)
The value of being affirmative and the value of being concrete have
already been touched upon. There remains the value of being specific.
Possibly, in this present happy hour, when our country has grown
suddenly sensible and has become practical enough to pick out at last,
once more, a President with a real serious working sense of humour, even
a sense of humour about himself, it may not be considered disrespectful
if I continue a little longer dropping in on the Government, and saying
what I have to say in a few plain and homely words.
The trouble with most people in being economical with their money is,
that when they spend it, they spend it on something in particular, and
when they save it, they try to save it in a kind of general way. The
same principle applies to doing right. It is because when people do
right, they do it in a kind of general pleasant, abstract way, and when
they do wrong they always do something in particular, that they are so
Wicked.
A man will do almost anything to save his life at a particular place and
at a particular time, say at ten o'clock to-morrow morning, if he is
drowning, but if he has a year to save it in, a year of controlling his
appetites, of daily, detailed mastering of his spirit, of not taking a
piece of mince pie, of stopping his work in time and of going to bed
early, he will die.
It is easier when one is going under water for the third time and sees a
rope, to stretch just one inch more and grasp the rope, reach up to
forty more years of one's life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a
rope, than it is to spread out saving one's life over a whole year, 365
breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of
reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up
with a swing at the end of one's year at the tiptop of one's being, as
if it had only taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the
creative imagination of seeing the whole, of having a happy, daily,
detailed spectacle of the end in view, that is, of the part in its
setting of the whole--going without a piece of mince pie. If one could
only make one's self see the piece of mince pie as it is, it would not
be difficult. If one could see it on the plate there and see the not
taking it as a little wedge-shaped rivet, a little triangular link of
coupling in the chain that keeps one holding on forty years longer to
this planet, a piece of mince pie left on a plate would become a Vision.
This seems to be the principle that works best in getting other people
to be good.
Perhaps the President will succeed in getting Trusts to be good, by
taking hold of specific Trusts, one by one, and setting them--all
mankind looking on--in the nation's vision, setting them even in their
own vision--taking the Trusts that thought they had got what they
wanted, making them stand up and look (in some great public lighted
place) at what pathetic, tragical failures they are, letting them see
that what their Trust had wanted all along, if it had only thought about
it, was not success one went to jail for--success by getting the best
out of the most people, but success by serving the most people the best.
A great many of us in America have been exercising our minds for a long
time now about the eagerness of the Trusts, and the trouble we were
going to have in curbing the eagerness of the Trusts.
Sometimes I have wondered if, after all, it was our minds we were
exercising, for when one sits down seriously to think of it, it is the
eagerness of the Trusts that is the most hopeful thing about them.