Crowds Part 46

And there has to be something very like a western exposure in him too, a touch of the homely seer, a habit of having reflections and afterglows, a sense of principles, and of the philosophy of men and things.

If I were to try to sum up all these qualities in a man and call it by one name, I would call it Glorified-commonsense.

If I were asked to define Glorified-commonsense I would say it is a glory which works. It belongs to the man who has a vision or coinage for others because he sees them as they are, and sees how the glory buried in them (_i.e._, the inspiration or source of hard work in them) can be got out.

Everywhere that the Artist in business, or Organizer, with his Inventors on one side of him and his Hewers on the other, can be seen to-day competing with the man who has the mere millionaire or owning type of mind, he is crowding him from the market.

It is because he understands how Inventors and Hewers feel and what they think and when he turns on Inventors he makes them invent and when he turns on Hewers he makes them hew.

The Hewer often thinks because he is rich or because he owns a business, that he can take the place of the artist, but he can be seen every day in every business around us, being pa.s.sed relentlessly out of power because he cannot make his Inventors invent and cannot make his Hewers hew as well as some other man. The moment his Inventors and Hewers think of him, hear about him, or have any dealing with him--with the mere millionaire, the mere owner kind of person, his Inventors invent as little as they can, and his Hewers hew as softly as they dare.

This is called the Modern Industrial Problem.

And no man but the artist, the man with the inventing and the hewing spirit both in him, who daily puts the inventing spirit and the hewing spirit together in himself, can get it together in others.

Only the man who has kept and saved both the inventing and hewing spirit in himself can save it in others--can be a saviour or artist.

CHAPTER XIX

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.

It was because Christ, Savonarola, and John Bunyan were all trying to save themselves that it ever so much as occurred to them to save worlds.

Saving a world was the only way to do it.

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 G.o.d 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.

CHAPTER XX

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.

On closer examination the two Inventors in the office were found to be not Inventors at all. One of them was a fine Hewer who liked to hew and who hated inventing and the other was merely a rich Hewer who was an owner in the business who saw suddenly that he would have to stop inventing and stop very soon if he wanted the business to make any more money.

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.