Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

THE MAN WHO STANDS BY

I have been trying to say in this book that goodness in daily life, or in business, in common world-running or world housekeeping, is by an implacable crowd-process working slowly out of the hands of the wrong men into the hands of the right ones.

If this is not true, I am ready to declare myself as a last resort, in favour of a strike.

There is only one strike that would be practical.

I would declare for a strike of the saviours.

By a saviour I do not mean a man who stoops down to me and saves me. A saviour to me is a man who stands by and lets me save myself.

I am afraid we cannot expect much of men who can bear the idea of being saved by other people, or by saviours who have a stooping feeling.

I rejoice daily in the spirit of our modern laboring men, in that holy defiance in their eyes, in the way they will not say "please" to their employers and announce that they will save themselves.

The only saviour who can do things for labouring men is the saviour who proposes to do things with them, who stands by, who helps to keep oppressors and stooping saviours off—who sees that they have a fair chance and room to save themselves.

I define a true saviour as a man who is trying to save himself.

The Cross was Christ's final stand for his own companionableness, his stand for being like other people, for having other people to share his life with, his faith in others and his joy in the world.

The world was saved incidentally when Christ died on the Cross. He wanted to live more abundantly—and he had to have certain sorts of people to live more abundantly with. He did not want to live unless he could live more abundantly.

We live in a world in which inventors want to die if they cannot invent and in which Hewers want to die if they cannot hew.

I am not proud. I am willing to be saved. Any saviour may save me if he wants to, if his saving me is a part of his saving himself.

If the inventor saves me and saves us all because he wants to be in a world where an inventor can invent, wants some one to invent to; if the artist saves me because it is part of his worship of God to have me saved and wants to use me every day to rejoice about the world with—if the Hewer comes over and hews out a place in the world for me because he wants to hew, I am willing.

All that I demand is, that if a man take the liberty of being a saviour to me that he refrain from stooping, that he come up to me and save me like a man, that he stand before me and tell me that here is something that we, he and I, shoulder to shoulder, can do, something that neither of us could do alone. Then he will fall to with me and I will fall to with him, and we will do it.

This is what I mean by a saviour.

THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS

A factory in —— some ten years ago employed one hundred men. Three of these men were in the office and ninety-seven were hands in the works. To-day this same factory which is doing a very much larger business is still employing one hundred men, but thirty of the men are employed in the office and seventy in the works.

Ten years, ago to put it in other words, the factory provided places for one artist or manager and two inventors and places for ninety-seven Hewers.

To-day the factory has made room for thirty inventors, one manager and twenty-nine men who spend their entire time in thinking of things that will help the Hewers hew.

It has seventy Hewers who are helping the Inventors invent by hewing three times as hard and three times as skilfully or three times as much as without the Inventors to help them, they had dreamed they could hew before.

The Artist or Organizer who made this change in the factory found that among the ninety-seven Hewers that were employed a number of Hewers were hewing very poorly, because though hewing was the best they could do, they could not even hew. He found certain others who were hewing poorly because they were not Hewers, but Inventors. These he set to work—some of them inventing in the office.

There are four things that the Artist has to do with a factory like this before he can make it efficient.

Each of these things is an art. One art is the art of compelling the mere owner, the man with the merely hewing mind, to confine himself to the one thing he knows how to do, namely to shovelling, to shovelling his money in when and where he was told it was needed, and to shovelling his money out when it has been made for him.

The art of compelling a mere owner to know his place, of keeping him shovelling money in and shovelling money out silently and modestly, consists as a rule in having the Artist or Organizer tell him that unless the business is placed completely in his hands he will not undertake to run it.

This is the first art. The second art consists in having an understanding with the inventors that they will invent ways of helping the Hewers hew.

The third art consists in having an understanding with the Hewers that they will accept the help of the Inventors and hew with it. The fourth art is the art of representing the consumer with the Hewer and with the Inventor and with the Owner and seeing that he shares in the benefits of all economies and improvements.

These are all human arts and turn on the power in a man of being a true artist, of being a man-inventor, a man-developer and a man-mixer, daily taking part of himself and using these parts in putting other men together.

These organizers or artists, being the men who see how—are the men who are not afraid.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK

TO ANYBODY

A Child said, "What is grass?" fetching it to me with full hands.

How could I answer the Child?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

"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."

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 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.

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?"

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

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.