Crowds Part 65

Sixth: after getting copartnership tolerated for certain workmen employed in certain firms I would try to make copartnership a trades-union movement.

I would then let the trades unions educate the employers.

Seventh: I would prepare a list of apparent exceptions to copartnership as a working principle. I would investigate and try to see why they were exceptions and why copartnership would not work, and I would find and set inventors at work, and find in what way the spirit that is back of copartnership could be applied.

CHAPTER XIV

NEWS-MACHINES

We want to be good and the one thing we need to do is to tell each other. Then we will be good. Our conveniences for being good in crowds are not finished yet.

We have invented machines for crowds to see one another with and to use in getting about in the dark. One engine whirls round and round all night so that half a million people can be going about anywhere after sunset without running into each other.

Crowds have vast machines for being somewhere else--run in somewhat the same way all from one unpretentious building they put up called a Power House.

A great many of our machines for allowing crowds of people to move their bodies around with have been attended to, but our Intelligence-Machine, our machine for knowing what other people really think, and what they are like in their hearts so that we can know enough to be good to them, and have brains enough to get them to be good to us, is not finished and set up yet.

The industrial problem instead of being primarily an economic problem is a news problem.

If a President were to appoint a Secretary of Labour and were to give him as one of his conveniences, a news engineer--an expert at attracting and holding the attention of labour unions and driving through news to them about themselves that they do not know yet, who would be practically at the head of the department in two years? The Secretary or the Secretary's news engineer? News is all there is to such a department, finding out what it is and distributing it. Any one can think of scores of labour-union fallacies, news they do not know about themselves that they will want to know at once when their attention is called to it.

If nine members of the President's Cabinet were national news agents, experts in nationalizing news, one member could do with his subordinates all the other things that Cabinet members do.

The real problem before each Cabinet member is a problem of news. If the Secretary of Commerce, for instance, could get people to know certain things, he would not need to do at all most of the things that he is doing now. Neither would the Attorney General.

If everything in a Cabinet position turns on getting people to know things, why not get them to know them? Why not take that job instead?

Why not take the job of throwing one's self out of a job? Every powerful man has done it--thrown himself out of what he was doing, by making up something bigger to do from the beginning of the world.

In every business it is the man who can recognize, focus, organize, and apply news, and who can get news through to people, who soon becomes the head of the business.

The man who can get news through to directors and to employees and make them see themselves and see one another and the facts as they are, soon gets to be Head of the factory.

The man who can get news through to the public, the salesman of news to people about what they want to buy and about how they are to spend their money--very personal, intimate news to every man--soon rises to be Head of the Head of the factory and of the entire business.

It will probably be the same in a cabinet or in a government. If the Secretary of the Department of Commerce has a news engineer as a subordinate in his department and begins to study and observe how to do his work best, how to solve his problem in the nation, we will soon see the head of the department, if he really is the head of the department, quietly taking over his news engineer's job and letting his news engineer have his.

It is a news engineering job, being a Secretary of Commerce.

Every member of the Cabinet has a news engineering job.

And the fact seems to be that the moment the news is attended to in each member's department--applied news, special and private news, turned on and set to work where it is called for--most members of cabinets, secretaries of making people do things, and for that matter, the Presidents of making people do things will be thrown out of employment.

The Secretaries of What People Think, and the President of What People Think--the engineers of the news in this nation--will be the men who govern it.

CHAPTER XV

NEWS-CROWDS

I have tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of tentative working vision or hope of what authors and of what newspaper men can do in governing a country.

This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being.

Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find out what plain human beings are like.

It does not matter very long what other things a government gets wrong, if it gets the people right.

This suggests something that each of us can do.

I was calling on ----, Treasurer of ----, in his new bank, not long ago--a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on this wicked world--a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from above. It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money.

"This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built it?"

---- mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of him.

I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the bank. He said he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set against it.

And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they were. They kept offering a good many rather vague objections, and for a long time he could not really make them out.

Finally he got it. All the objections boiled down to one.

Non was too good to be true. If there was a man like Non in this world, they said, they would have heard about it before.

When I was telling ex-Mayor ----, in ----, about Non, the first time, he interrupted me and asked me if I would mind his ringing for his stenographer. He was a trustee and responsible, either directly or indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and he wanted the news in writing.

Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said, but he wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of its being true would be very important to him, he was going to have it looked up.

Now ex-Mayor ---- is precisely the kind of man (as half the world knows) who, if he had been a contractor, instead of what he had happened to be, would have been precisely the kind of contractor Non is. He has the same difficult, heroic blend of shrewd faiths in him, of high motives and getting what he wants.

But the moment ex-Mayor ---- found these same motives put up to be believed in at one remove, and in somebody else, he thought they were too good to be true.

I have found myself constantly confronted in the last few years of observation with a very singular and interesting fact about business men.

Nine business men out of ten I know, who have high motives, (in a rather bluff simple way, without particularly thinking about it, one way or the other) seem to feel a little superior to other people. They begin, as a rule, apparently, by feeling a little superior to themselves, by trying to keep from seeing how high their motives are, and when, in the stern scuffle of life, they are unable any longer to keep from suspecting how high their motives are themselves, they fall back on trying to keep other people from suspecting it.

In ----'s factory in ----, the workers in bra.s.s, a few years ago, could not be kept alive more than two years because they breathed bra.s.s filings. When ---- installed, at great expense, suction machines to place beside the men to keep them from breathing bra.s.s, some one said, "Well surely you will admit this time, that this is philanthropy?"

"Not at all."

The saving in bra.s.s air alone, gathered up from in front of the men's mouths, paid for the machines. What is more he said that after he had gone to the expense of educating some fine workmen, if a mere little sucking machine like that could make the best workmen he had, work for him twenty years instead of two years, it was poor economy to let them die.