BOOK TWO

      LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD


      CHAPTER X

      THE STUPENDOUS, THE UNUSUAL, THE MONOTO-
      NOUS, AND THE SUCCESSFUL

      THE imagination of crowds may be said to be touched most
      successfully when it is appealed to in one of four ways:

      The Stupendous.

      The Unusual.

      The Monotonous.

      The Successful.

      Of these four ways, the stupendous, or the unusual, or
      the successful are the most in evidence, and have something
      showy about them, so that we can look at them afterward,
      and point out at a glance what they have done. But probably
      the underhold on the crowd, the real grip on its imagination,
      the one which does the plain, hard, everyday work on a crowd's
      ideals, which determines what crowds expect and what crowds
      are like inside—is the Monotonous.

      The man who tells the most people what they shall be like
      in this world is not the great man or the unusual man. He
      is the monotonous man.

      He is the man, to each of us, who determines the unconscious
      beat and rhythm with which we live our daily lives.

      If we wanted to touch the imaginations of crowds, or of
      any particular crowd, with goodness, the best way to do it
      would probably be, not to go to the crowd itself, but to the
      man who is so placed that he determines the crowd's monot-
      ony, the daily rhythm with which it lives—the man, if we can
      find him, who arranges the crowd's heart-beat.

      It need not take one very long to decide who the man is
      who determines the crowd's heart-beat. The man who has [143]
      the most dominion over the imaginations of most of us, who
      stands up high before us out in front of our lives, the man
      who, as with a great baton, day after day, night after night,
      conducts, as some great symphony, the fate of the world above
      our heads, who determines the deep, unconscious thoughts
      and motives, the inner music or sing-song, in which we live
      our lives, is the man to whom we look for our daily bread.

      It is the men with whom we earn our money who are tell-
      ing us all relentlessly, silently, what we will have to be like.
      The men with whom we spend it, who sell things to us, like
      the department stores, those huge machines of attention,
      may succeed in getting great sweeps of attention out of crowds
      at special times, by appealing to men through the unusual
      and through the stupendous or the successful. But what
      really counts, and what finally decides what men and what
      women shall be, what really gets their attention unfathomably,
      unconsciously, is the way they earn their money. The feel-
      ing men come to have about a fact, of its being what it is,
      helplessly or whether or no—the feeling that they come to
      have about something, of its being immemorially and innu-
      merably the same everywhere and forever, comes from what
      they are thinking and the way they think while they are
      earning their money. It is out of the subconscious and the
      monotonous that all our little heavens and hells are made.

      It is our daily work that becomes to us the real floor and roof
      of living, hugs up under us like the ground, fits itself down
      over us, and is our earth and sky. The man with whom we
      earn our money, the man who employs us, his thinking or
      not thinking, his "I will" and "I won't," are the iron bound-
      aries of the world to us. He is the skylight and the manhole
      of life.

      The monotonous, the innumerable and over and over again,
      one's desk, one's typewriter, one's machine, one's own partic-
      ular factory window, the tall chimney, the little forever
      motion with one's hand—it is these, godlike, inscrutable, [144]
      speechless, out of the depths of our unconsciousness and
      down through our dreams, that become the very breath and
      rumble of living to us, domineer over our imaginations and
      rule our lives. It is decreed that what our Employers think
      and let us know enough to think shall be a part of the inner
      substance of our being. It shall be a part of growing of the
      grass to us, and shall be as water and food and sleep. It
      shall be to us as the shouts of boys at play in the field and as
      the crying of our children in the night. To most men Em-
      ployers are the great doors that creak at the end of the world.

      It is not the houses that people live in, or the theatres that
      they go to, or the churches to which they belong, or the street
      and number—the East End look or the West End look the
      great city carves on the faces of these men I see in the street
      —that determines what the men are like.

      Their daily work lies deeper in them than their faces. One
      finds one's self as one Hashes by being told things in their walk,
      in the way they hold their hands and swing their feet.

      And what is it their hands and feet, umbrellas, bundles,
      and the wrinkles in their clothes tell us about them?

      They tell us how they earn their money. Their hopes,
      their sorrow, their fears and curses, their convictions, their
      very religions are the silent, irrevocable, heavenly minded,
      diabolical by-products of what their Employers think they
      can afford to let them know enough to think.

      "Fight for yourselves. Your masters hate you. They would shoot you down
      like rabbits, but they need your labour for their huge profits. Don't go 
      in till
      you get your minimum. No Royal Commission, no promise in the future.
      Leaders only want your votes; they will sell you. They lie. Parliament 
      lies,
      and will not help you, but is trying to sell you. Don't touch a tool till 
      you get
      your minimum. Win, win, win! It is up to all workers to support the 
      miners."

      If a man happens to be an employer, and happens to know
      that he is not this sort of man, and finds that he cannot suc-
      cessfully carry on his business unless he can make five hun-
      dred men in his factory believe it, what can he do? How [145]
      can he touch their imaginations? What language is there,
      either of words or of action, that will lead them to see that
      he is a really a fair-minded, competent employer, a repre-
      sentative of the interests of all, a fellow-citizen, a Crowdman,
      and that his men can afford to believe in him and cooperate
      with them?

      If they think he would shoot them down like rabbits, it
      is because they have not the remotest idea what he is really
      like. They have not noticed him. They have no imagina-
      tion about him, have not put themselves in his place. How
      can he get their attention?
 


      CHAPTER XI

      THE SUCCESSFUL

      A LITTLE while ago I saw in Paris an American woman,
      the President of a Woman's Club (I imagined), who was doing
      as she should, and was going about in a cab appreciating Paris,
      drive up to the Louvre. Leaving her cab, though I wondered a
      little why she did, at the door, she hurried up the steps and
      swept into the gallery, taking her eleven-year-old boy with
      her. I came upon her several times. The Louvre did not in-
      terest the boy, and he seemed to be bothering and troubling
      his mother, and of course he kept trying very hard, as any
      really nice boy would, to get out; but she would not let him,
      and he wandered about dolefully, looking at his feet and at
      the floor, or at the guards, and doing the best he could. Finally
      she came over to him; there was a Murillo he must see—it
      was the opportunity of his life; she brought him over to it,
      and stood him up in front of it, and he would not look; she
      took his small brown head in her hands and steered it to the
      great masterpiece and held it there—on that poor, silent,
      helpless Murillo—until . . .

      I observed that she could steer his head; but I could not
      help thinking how much more she would have done if she
      had known how to steer it inside.

      The invention of the Megaphone, of the Cinema, and the
      London Times, and of the Bible, are all a part of the great, happy,
      hopeful effort of one part of this world to get the attention
      of the other part of it, and steer heads inside.

      This art of steering heads inside, which has come to be the
      secret art of all the other arts, the secret religion of all the re-
      ligions, is also the secret of building and maintaining a civili- [147]
      zation and a successful and permanent business. It is hard
      to believe how largely, for the last twenty years, it has been
      overlooked by employers as the real key of the labour prob-
      lem—this art of steering people's heads inside.

      We have seen part of the truth. We have put in a good
      deal of time in finding fault with labouring men for thinking
      too much about themselves and about their class, and for
      emphasizing their wages more than their work, and for not
      having more noble and disinterested characters. Parlia-
      ments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for
      years about Labour, and they have been trying very hard
      on Sundays and through reports of speeches by members of
      Parliament in the daily press, and through laws, and through
      employers' associations, and through factory rules and fines,
      to get the attention of labouring men and lift their thoughts
      to higher things.

      A great many wise things have been said to Labour—
      masterpieces, miles of them as it were, whole Louvres of
      words have been hung upon their walls.

      But in vain!

      And all because we have merely taken the outside of the
      boy's head in our hands. We have not thought what was
      really going on in it. We have not tried to steer it inside.
      We have been superficial.

      It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his
      pocket to talk to a starving man about having some higher
      motive than getting something to eat. Everybody sees
      that this is superficial, if we mean by it that his body is starv-
      ing. But if we mean something more real and more terrible
      than that—that he is starving inside, that his soul is starv-
      ing, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting
      something to eat—if we mean by it, in other words, that
      the man's imagination it not touched even by his own life,
      people take it very lightly.

      And it is the most important thing in the world. The [148]
      one thing now necessary to society, to industry, is to get
      hold of the men who are in it, one by one, and touch their
      imaginations about themselves. We have millions of men
      working without their thoughts and expectations being venti-
      lated or passed along, year after year.

      One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands
      of factories, doing their work without any draught. We
      already have tall chimneys for our coal furnaces; we have
      next to see the value of tall chimneys, great flues to the sky,
      on the lives and thought and the inner energies of men.

      The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get
      him to glow up and work is to cut through an opening in the
      top of his life.

      Just where to cut this opening, and just how to cut it in
      each man's life—each man considered as a problem by him-
      self—is the Labour problem.

      There are certain general principles that might be put
      down in passing. To begin with, we must not feel ashamed
      to begin implacably with the actual man just as he is, and
      with the wants and the motives that he actually has. We
      should feel ashamed rather to begin in any other way. It
      would not be bright or thoughtful to begin on him with mo-
      tives he is going to have; and it certainly would not be relig-
      ious or worthy of us to try to make him begin with ours. Per-
      haps ours are better—for us. Perhaps, too, ours will be
      better for him when he is like us (if we can give him any rea-
      son to want to be). In the meantime, what is there that
      can honestly be called base in taking human nature as it is
      and in allowing a sliding scale of motives in people? Starv-
      ing people and slaves, or people who are ugly and hateful,
      i.e., not really quite bright toward others, who impute mean,
      inaccurate motives to them, can only be patiently expected
      to have a very small area or even mote of unselfishness at
      first. A cross-section of our society to-day represents the
      entire geological formation of human nature for 40,000 years. [149]
      We need but look on the faces of the men about us as we go
      down the street. All history is here this minute.

      We wish that Labour had better motives. We wish to
      get our workmen to understand us better and believe in us
      more and work for us harder.

      We agree that we must begin with them, if we propose to do
      this, where they are.

      Where are they?

      There are certain general observations that might seem
      to the point.

      1. If a man is a sane and sound man and works hard, he
      must feel that everything he does, every minute, is definitely
      connected with the main through-train purpose in his life.

      2. If the main purpose in his life is domestic and con-
      sists in having his family live well and giving his children
      a chance, he must feel and be absolutely sure when he is work-
      ing better or working worse for his employer that he is
      working better or worse for himself and for those for whom
      he lives.

      3. In the ordinary labourer this domestic unselfishness
      or house patriotism is a kind of miniature public spirit. It
      is the elementary form of his national or human enthusiasm.
      It is the form of disinterestedness that has to be attended
      to in men first; and the way for society to get the labouring
      man to be public-spirited, to have the habit of considering
      the rights of others, is for society to have the habit of consid-
      ering his rights in his daily work. An intelligent, live man
      must be allowed a little margin to practise being unselfish
      on, if only in the privacy of his own family. Unselfishness
      begins in small circles. The starving man must be allowed
      a smaller range of unselfishness than the man who has enough.
      It is not uncomplimentary or unworthy in human nature
      to admit that this is so—to demand that the human being
      who is starving must be allowed to be selfish. If he is not
      bright enough to be selfish when he is hungry he is dangerous [150]
      to society. We ought to insist upon his being selfish, and
      help him in it. Virtue is a surplus.

      4. This is the first humble, stuttering speech the com-
      petent modern employer who proposes to express himself
      to his men, and get them to understand him and work with
      him, is going to make. He is going to pick out one by one
      every man in his works who has a decent, modest, manly
      desire to be selfish, and help him in it. He is going to do
      something or say something that will make the man see,
      that will make him believe for life, that the most powerful,
      the most trustworthy, the most far-sighted man he can find
      in the world to be his partner in being decently, soundly,
      and respectfully selfish—is his employer.

      No employer can expect to get the best work out of a man
      except by working down through to the inner organic desire
      in the man as a man, except by waking his selfishness up
      and by making it a larger, fuller, nobler, weightier selfishness,
      and turning the full weight of it every minute, every hour,
      on his daily work.

      The best language an employer can find to express this
      desire at first to his workmen, is some form of faithful, honest
      copartnership.

      5. The ordinary wage labourer has little imagination
      about other people because he is not allowed any about him-
      self. The moment he is, and the moment his employer ar-
      ranges his work so that he sees every minute all day that
      the work which he does for the firm 30 per cent better counts.
      30 per cent more on his own main purpose in life, his imagina-
      tion is touched about himself and he begins to work like a
      human being. When a man has been allowed to work awhile
      as a human being he will begin to be human with a wider
      range. Being a partner touches the imagination and wakes
      the man's humanness up. He not only works better, but
      he loves his family better when he sees he can do something
      for them. He serves his town better and his lodge better [151]
      when he sees he can do something for them.

      6. Being a partner wakes the man's imagination toward
      those who work with him, and toward the public and the
      markets and the goods and the cities where the goods go.

      He reads newspapers with a new eye. He becomes interested
      in people who buy the goods, and in people who do not. Why
      do they not? He gropes toward a general interest in human
      nature, and begins to live.

      7. A man who is being paid wages one night in a week,
      has his imagination touched about his work one night in the
      week. He is merely being a wage-earner. In being a part-
      ner he is being paid, and feels his pay coming in, every thirty
      seconds, in the better way he moves his hands or does not
      move his hands. This makes him a man.

      8. And, finally, as he knows he is being paid, and that
      he always will be paid, what he earns, he stops thinking of
      the sick, tired side of his work—the pay he gets out of it,
      and begins to love the work itself, and begins to be perfect in
      it for its own sake. This makes him a gentleman.

      9. Being a partner makes a man actively and keenly
      reasonable and practical, not only about his own labour,
      but about the superior value of other people with whom he
      works. He wants the best people in the best places. He
      begins to have a practical partner's imagination about the
      men who are over him, and about their knowing more than
      he does. If he is merely paid wages, he is superstitious,
      and jealous toward those who know more than he does. If
      he is paid profits, he is glad that they do, and strikes in and
      helps.

      10. Another complete range of motives is soon offered
      to the employee who is a partner. He feels the joy of
      being a part of a big, splendid whole, a disinterested de-
      light and pride in others. He grows young with it, like a boy
      in school.

      Here is the factory over him, around him—his own vast [152]
      hockey team—and over that is the nation, and over that
      is the world!

      An employer can touch the imagination of most men, of the
      rank and file of the people, ninety-nine times where other people
      can touch it once. And every time he touches it, he touches
      it to the point.

      If men in general do not believe to-day in religion and do not
      want it, it is because they have employers who have not seen
      any place in their business where they could get their religion in,
      and have kept the people (in the one place where they could
      really learn what religion is) from learning anything about it.

      The moment the more common employers see what the great
      ones see now, that business is the one particular place in this
      world where religion really works, works the hardest, the long-
      est, and the best, works as it had never been dreamed a religion
      could be made to work before—the day school teachers of
      the world, put the Golden Rule in the Course everybody will
      know it.

      It only takes a moment's thought to see what the employers
      of the world could do with the Golden Rule the moment they
      take hold of it.

      One has but to consider what they have done with it al-
      ready.

      One has but to consider the astounding way in the last fifteen
      years they have made everybody not-believe in it.

      The employers of the world have been saying ten hours a
      day to everybody that the Golden Rule is a foolish, pleasant,
      inefficient, worsted motto on a parlour wall.

      Everybody has believed it.

      And now that the big employers are setting the pace and are
      saying exactly the opposite thing about the Golden Rule, now
      that all the employers are trying to get their employees to be
      efficient (to do by their employers as they would be done by),
      and now that they are trying to be efficient themselves (are
      trying to do to their employees as they would have their [153]
      employees do to them), the Golden Rule is touching the
      imagination of crowds, and the crowd is seeing that the
      Golden Rule works. They watch it working every day
      in the things they know about. Then they believe in it for
      other things.