Crowds Part 52

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 cla.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ating 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 b.u.t.t 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 a.n.a.lysis 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.