Crowds Part 4

It does not take very long to see which one prefers when one considers the problem of living in one world or the other. If we are to take our choice between living in a world run by tired men and a world run by inspired ones, most of us will have little difficulty in deciding which we would prefer, and which one we are bound to have. I have been moved to come forward with the idea of inspired employers--or, as I have called it, "Inspired Millionaires"--because it would seem to me inspired employers are the very least we can ask for; for certainly if even our employers cannot be inspired or rested and strong, we cannot expect their overworked workmen to be. There is no hope for us but to write our books and to live our lives in such a way as to help put the world in the hands of the Strong, and to help keep its inst.i.tutions and customs out of the hands of the overworked. Overworked mechanical employers and overworked labourers are the last men to solve the problem of the overworked, except in a small, tired, mean, resentful, temporary way.

And so, as I look about me and watch the machines and the men who are working with the machines, or owning them, it is on this principle that I find myself taking sides. I will not live, if I can help it, in a world that is conceived and arranged and managed by tired and overworked and mechanical men. Have I not seen tired, mechanical men, whole generations of them, vast mobs of them, the men who have let the machines mow down their souls? The first thing I have come to ask of a man, if he is to be at the head of a machine--whether it is a machine called a factory, or a machine called a Government or a city, or a machine called a nation--is, _Is he tired?_ I have cast my lot once for all--and as it seems to me, too, the lot of the world--with those men who are rested, with the surplus men, the men who want to work more not less, who are still and gentle and strong in their hearts, steady in their imaginations, great men--men who are not driven to being self-centred or driven to being cla.s.s-centred, who can be world-centred and inspired.

When one has made this decision, that one will work for a world in control of men who are strong, one suddenly is brought face to face with a fact in our machine civilization which probably is quite new, and which the spirit of man has never had to face in any age before.

For the first time in the history of the world, machinery has made it possible for the world to get into the hands of the weak.

The Gun began it--the gun in a coward's hands may side with the weak, and the machine in the hands of the weak may temporarily give the world a list or a trend, and leave it leaning on the wrong side.

The Trust, for instance, which is really an extremely valuable invention, and perhaps, on the whole, the most important machine of modern times when it is used to defend the rights of the people, is a very different thing when it is pointed at them. We have to-day, not unnaturally, the spectacle of perhaps nine people out of ten getting up and saying in chorus all through the world that Trusts ought to be abolished; and yet it cannot honestly be said that there is really anything about the trust-machine--any more than any other machine--that is inherently wicked, or mechanical and heartless. Our real objection to the trust-machines is not to the machines themselves, but to the fact that they are, or happen to be (judging each Trust by itself), in the hands of the weak and of the tired--of men, that is, who have no spirit, no imagination about people; mechanical-minded men, who, at least in the past, have taken the easiest and laziest course in business--that of making all the money they can.

The moment we see the Trusts in the hands of the strong men, the men who are unwilling to slump back into mere money-making, and who face daily with hardihood and with joy the feat of weaving into business several strands of value at once, making things and making money and making men together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human happiness, lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day and night.

If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under the machines, we can only bring it to pa.s.s by doing everything we can in directors'

meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or as journalists--whatever we may be--to keep the trust-machines in this world out of the hands of the tired, weak, and mechanical-minded men.

And the things that have been happening to the trust-machines, or are about to happen to them, have happened and are beginning to happen before our eyes to the machines themselves. The machines of flame and iron wheels and men in monstrous factories which the philosophers and the poets and the very preachers have doomed our world with are pa.s.sing through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall be seen at last through the dim struggle yielding themselves, bending their iron wills to the same indomitable human spirit, the same slow, stern, implacable will of the soul of man. They shall be inspired machines.

Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees mechanical-minded. The men have not been able to work without machines to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them, their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into machines themselves--as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood.

In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing--partly by compet.i.tion and partly by combination and by experience--employers who are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe in it and can use it in others; who find ways of adjusting the hours, the wages, and the conditions of work for the men, so that what is most valuable in them, their spirit, their imaginations, their hourly good-will, can all be turned into the business, can all daily be used as the most important part of the working equipment of the factory. These employers have found (by believing it long enough to try it) that live men can do better and more marketable work than dead ones. If the great slow-moving majority of our modern machine employers were not mechanical-minded, it would not be necessary to prove to them categorically the little plat.i.tude (which even people who have observed cab-horses know) that the living is more valuable than the half-dead, and that live men can do better and more marketable work than half-dead ones.

But, of course, if they are not convinced by imagination or by arguments or by figures, they may have to be convinced by losing their business; for the most spirited employers, those who take the more difficult and creative course of making money and men together, are sure to be the employers who will get and keep the most spirited men, and are sure to crowd out of the market in their own special line employers who can only get and keep mechanical-minded ones.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the battle now going on among the trades unions between the spirited labourers and the tired ones, and among the manufacturers between the inspired employers and the mechanical-minded ones.

For the time being, at least, it is the inspired employers who have most power to change the conditions of labour and to free the mechanical-minded slaves. It is they who are standing to-day on the great strategical ground of our time. They hold the pa.s.s of human life.

People cannot expect to be inspired in crowds. Crowds are too unwieldy and too inconvenient to act quickly. The people can only concentrate their energies on getting and demanding inspired employers, on insisting that the men who for eight or nine hours a day are pouring in with their wages their thoughts, and their motives, the very hope with which they live, into their lives, shall be the champions of the people, shall represent them and act for them, as they are not placed to act for themselves, and with more imagination than they can yet expect to have for themselves. If our labouring men of to-day are going to struggle out from under the machines, they can only do it by doing all that they can in labour unions and in the press and at the polls to keep the machines in this world out of the hands of tired and mechanical-minded owners.

But probably the more immediate rescue from the evil or mechanicalness in machines is not going to come from the employers on the one hand or the employees on the other, but from having the employees in the Trades Unions and the employers in the directors' meetings combining together to keep in subordinate places where they cannot hurt others all men, whether directors or employees, who do not work harder than they have to, and who have not the brains to do their work for something besides money. The men who are like this will of course be pitied and duly considered, but they will be kept where they will not have power to control other men, or where by force of position or by mere majority they will be able to bully other men to work as mechanically as they do.

Workmen who do not want to become machines can only better conditions by combination with so-called inspired employers--employers who work harder than they have to, who dote on the great human difficulties of work, who choose not the easiest but the most perfect way of doing things, who are never mechanical themselves, and will not let their men be if they can help it. I have liked to call these employers inspired millionaires. I would rather have the machine owner or employer a millionaire, because the more machines an inspired employer can own, the more he can buy and get away from the uninspired ones, the sooner will the right of labour and the will of the people be accomplished. When the machines are in the hands of inspired and strong and spirited men--men of real competence or genius for business, the machines will be seen on every hand around us as the engines of war against evil, against slavery, the whirling weapons of the Spirit.

Even now, in dreams have I stood and watched them--the will of the people like a flail in their mighty hands--this vast army of machines--go thundering past, driving the uninspired and mechanical off the face of the earth.

CHAPTER IV

THE STRIKE--AN INVENTION FOR MAKING CROWDS THINK

When I was arranging to slip over from New York and get something I very much wanted in England last spring, I found myself held up suddenly in all my plans because some men on the docks had decided that there was something that they wanted too. They decided that I and thousands of other people in New York would have to wait over on the sh.o.r.es of America until they got it.

After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I took pa.s.sage, and in due time found myself standing on English soil, only to be informed that, while I might be allowed perhaps at least to stand on English soil, that was really as much as I could expect. I could not go anywhere because a number of men on the railways had decided that there was something they wanted and that I would have to wait till they got it.

I could go down and look at the silent, cold locomotives on the rails, and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked about getting up to London, but these men had decided that there was something that they wanted and I must wait.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men, and what had Liverpool and London done to them?

After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into its little ways, and was busily driving about and attending to my business as I had planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted something, brought me up to a full stop one rainy day, and said that they had decided that if I wanted to ride I would have to walk, or that I would have to poke dismally about in a 'bus, or worm my way through under the ground. As I understood it, there was something that they wanted and something that they were going to get; and while of course in a way, they recognized that there might be something that I wanted too, I would have to wait till they got theirs.

I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor could I see what the thousands of other good people in London that I saw walking and puddling about, or watched waiting twenty minutes or so with long, hopeful, dogged whistles for cabs, had done to them.

A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of some more men who wanted something--this time up in Lancashire. They had decided that they wouldn't let some two or three hundred thousand other men go to their work until they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way.

Day by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling the world it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all because--a certain Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North Lancashire did not like or did not think that they liked, the North Lancashire Trades Union. (The general idea seemed to be to have all the others join in, everywhere--fifty-four million spindles, and four hundred and forty thousand looms--and wait and keep perfectly still until Mr. and Mrs.

Riley could make up their minds.)

And now this present week, morning after morning I take up my paper and read that 500,000 miners want something. I look in my fire dubiously day by day. I may have to go home to America in a few weeks to get warm.

Of course it is only fair to say at the outset that this little series of impressions, or sketches, as one may say, of Civilization as I have seen it since arriving in England are of such a nature that I need not have come over to England to observe them. I would be the last to deny that the same conveniences for being disagreeable and for getting in the way and for making a general muss of Life can be offered almost any time in my own hopeful and blundering country.

What more immediately concerns me in these things is that, having happened, there can be no doubt that they have some valuable and worthy meaning for me and for other people that I ought to get out of them.

One cannot stand by and see a great civilization like our English-speaking civilization, with its ocean liners, cathedrals, and aeroplanes, being undignified and inefficient before one's eyes and even a little ridiculous, without trying to see if it does not serve some purpose. There must be something beyond, something further and deeper, something newborn about it, which shall be worth our while. Strikes seem to be common people's way of thinking things out. If they had more imagination, they would know what they were going to think beforehand, without so much trouble perhaps; but so long as they have not, and so long as it is really true perhaps that all these millions of levers and wheels and engines will have to be stopped, so that the rich mechanical-minded people who own them and the poor mechanical-minded people who work with them can think better, we will have to be glad at least that they are thinking, and we will have to hope that they are thinking fast, and will soon have it over with. In the meantime, while they are thinking, we can think too.

It is never fair to lump people together, and there are always exceptions and special reasons to consider; but, speaking roughly, it is fair to lay it down as a general principle that it is apt to be the more common kind of employers and employees who find it difficult to think, and who need strikes to think with. When we see 175,000 weavers striking in Lancashire, and the Trades Unions insisting on the discharge of Non-Union men, and employers being willing to recognize the Unions but being unwilling to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves taking sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly we take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and now on the employer side in the dispute between Capital and Labour. We never know when we take up the morning paper, some of us, which side will be our next; and very often, if we were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly about a new dispute in the morning paper, we had taken promptly one side rather than the other, almost unconsciously, before we knew it we would not perhaps be able to say at once. The other day I became a little alarmed at myself at what looked at first like a kind of moral weakness, and inability to stand still on one side or the other in the contest between Labour and Capital; and I tried to think my way sternly through, and decide why it was my mind seemed to waver from one side to the other, and seemed so inconsistent and inefficient.

It seems to me I have just discovered a certain thread of consistency, as I look back over many disputes.

As near as I can remember, I find the side that uses force, or that uses the most force, invariably turns me against it. If, as I read, I find that both sides are using force, I find myself against both sides. I find myself wishing, in spite of my dislike of Socialism, that the nation had the power, when a quarrelsome industry turns to the people in the street and stops them in what they are doing, and tells the people in the street that they cannot ride, or that they shall not sleep, or that they cannot eat--when a quarrelsome industry insists on keeping the whole world up all night because it has a Stomach Ache, I feel suddenly that the people ought to be able to take the industry away and put it into such hands that the people in the streets will be protected; into hands that will make the industry behave so that it won't have a stomach ache. An industry with a stomach ache always has it because somebody in it has been over-eating and getting more than their share, and is incompetent and unfit; and obviously it should have its freedom, its privilege of selecting its food, taken away from it until it behaves.

Always allowing for exceptions, we may put it down as a general truth that, when we find a cause using force or mere advantage of position, it is because there is incompetence or lack of brains in those who conduct it, and the cure lies, not in more force, but in more brains. One cannot help being angered by force, because one knows that it is not only not a remedy, but is itself the cause of all incompetence and blindness in business. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up, postpones cooperation, defeats the mutual interest which is the very substance of business efficiency in a nation. Force is itself the injury mounting up more and more, which it seeks to cure.

The most likely way to prevent industrial trouble would seem to be to have employers and managers and foremen who have a genius for getting men to trust and believe in them. We are getting smoke-consumers, computing machines, and the next contrivance is going to be the employer who has the understanding spirit, and who sees the cash value of human genius, the value in the market of genius for being fair and getting on with people. Arbitration boards are at best (as they themselves would say) stupid and negative things, and though better than nothing, as a rule merely postpone evil or change symptoms. No one can ever really arbitrate for any one else either in industry or marriage except for a moment. The trouble lies deep down inside the people who keep needing arbitration. As long as these people are still there, and as long as incompetent employers or employees are there, there is bound to be trouble.

Turning out incompetent employers and incompetent labourers is the only way. We are getting rid of them as rapidly as possible. All business in the last resort turns on brains for being human and understanding people. Business, as people say, is partly business and business is partly economics, but more than anything else, in modern times, business is psychology.

Success is the science of being believed in. Incompetent employers and incompetent labourers are already being turned out, and are bound to be turned out implacably more and more, by the compet.i.tive nature of modern business. Under present conditions, if we have in each industry one single competent employing firm, with brains for being fair and brains for being far-sighted, and for being thoughtful of others--in short, with brains for being believed in--the control of that industry soon falls into their hands. People who use force instead of brains are second-rate, are out of the spirit of the times, and are going by. And this seems to be the spirit, too, which is to govern the more efficient Labour Unions as well as the more efficient Trusts.

If it were possible to collect the names in England and America of the men in each industry where brains were being personally believed in, we would have a list of the leaders of England and America for the next fifty years. Having a soul in business pays, not because it affords a fine motive power, but because it affords a practical and conclusive method of driving the devil out of business. He is being driven out of industry, one industry at a time, by men who get on better without him; and this is going to go on until the ability to do this--to crowd out the devil, to get the devil out of machines and factories, out of the machinery of organization--the power to keep the devil out of things and out of people, is recognized by everybody as the greatest, most subtle, most victorious and universal market-value in the world. The men who can be believed in most will get the most business, and, what is still more important, the men who can make men believe in them most will be able to hire the employees who can be believed in most, and will get a monopoly of the efficiency of the world; and though the men who can be believed in less may be able to continue for a time to do their work and go through all their old motions as well as they can, with all their old lumbering, pathetic machinery of watching each other and suspecting each other and fighting each other humped up on their backs, they can never hope to compete with free-moving, honest men, who deal directly and openly and in a few words for their employees, jobbers, consumers, and the public, without any vast machinery of suspicion to bother with. It is a most curious, local, temporary, back-county idea, the idea that, for sheer industrial economy, for simple cheap conclusive finance, there is anything on earth in business that will take the place of old-fashioned human personal prestige--the prestige of the man who has a genius for being believed in.

In a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen is an instance of what is really the essential issue in every strike. The bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated simply, was that they did not believe in their employers. They believed that, if the precise figures were known, their employers were getting more than their share.

On the other hand, the bottom fact about the employers was that they did not and could not believe that, if the precise figures were known, the cabmen were not getting more than their share. They insisted that the cabmen should publish, or make known, the precise figures of their extras. The cabmen declined to do it, and it made them look for the moment perhaps as if they were wrong. But were they necessarily wrong?

Was it really true that they had any more reason to trust their employers than their employers had to trust them? The cabmen might quite honestly and justly have said to the owners: "What we want is an honest, impeccable little dividend-recorder fastened on the back of every owner, as well as on our machines and on us. Then we will publish our extras."

The determining and important fact of economics in the last a.n.a.lysis always turns out to be some human fact, some fact about people. It is really true that just now, in the present half-stage of machine-industry, employers should nearly all be compelled to go about in this world with fare-recorders on their backs. Employees too. This would be the logical thing to do; and as it is impracticable, and as every business must have certain elements of secrecy in it in order to be competent, the only alternative is to have in charge men with enough genius for being believed in and for taking measures to be believed in--to keep employees believing in them, in spite of secrecy. Under these conditions, it cannot be long before we will see in every business the men being put forward on both sides who have a genius for being believed in. Managers and superintendents will be put in office everywhere who see the cash value, the economy, of the simple, old-fashioned power in a man of a genius for being believed in; employers with the power of inspiring more and better work from their workmen; Labour men with the power of inspiring employers to believe in them, of inspiring their employers to put up money, stock, or profits on their belief--on the belief that workmen are capable of the highest qualities of manhood: hard work, loyalty, persistence, and faith toward a common end. I have preferred to have this inspired employer a millionaire, because the more capital he has the more men he can employ, and the more rapidly the other kind of millionaire, the blind, old-fashioned b.u.t.ter of Labour, will be driven out of business.

Little can be done with one book, but at this special juncture, this psychological moment for copartnership and the spirit of copartnership, when all the world is touched to the quick by great strikes--at a time when one can sit still and almost hear the nations think--there are some of us who hope that the case we are trying to make out for copartnership between Capital and Labour will be of use to those who are trying to do things, and who for the moment find themselves foiled at every point by men who have given up believing in human nature. We wish to put ourselves on record, and to say that we do believe in human nature, and that we believe not only that the inspired employer is going to be evolved by the Crowd, but that the Crowd is going to recognize him and is going to take sides with him, and that the Crowd is going to justify him, make him succeed, is going to make his success its own success. In other words, we believe in heroes, crowds, and goodness; in men of heroic gifts--who are fit and meet to interpret the wills and desires of crowds--who are great men or Crowd-Men, crowds in spirit themselves.

I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as it seems to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our modern world, the silent master of what the crowds shall think. It has seemed to me that it is going to be a man of a marked type, and of a particular temperament, to whom we will have to look in our new and crowded world for the crowd-interpreter, or man who touches the imagination of crowds.

As our whole labour problem to-day turns on our being able to touch the imagination of Crowds, it may not be uninteresting in the next chapter to consider what a man who can do this will probably be like and the spirit in which he will do it.