BOOK THREE

      LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


      CHAPTER VII

      THE MEN'S MACHINES

      THERE was a time once in the old simple individual days
      when drygoods stores could be human. They expressed, in a
      quiet, easy way, the souls of the people who owned them.

      When machinery was invented and when organization was
      invented—machines of people—drygoods stores became vast
      selling machines.

      We then faced the problem of making a drygoods store with
      twenty-five hundred clerks in it as human as a drygoods store
      with fifteen.

      This problem has been essentially and in principle solved.
      At least we know it is about to be solved. We are ready to
      admit—most of us—that it is practicable for a department
      store to be human. Everything the man at the top does ex-
      presses his human nature and his personality to his clerks. His
      clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature.
      What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department
      stores work—the thing that passes through their hands, is
      human, and everything about it is human, or can be made
      human; and all the while vast currents of human beings, huge
      Mississippis of human feeling, flow past the clerks—thousands
      and thousands of souls a day, and pour over their souls, making
      them and keeping them human. The stream clears itself.

      But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about
      the practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men
      in a hole in the ground? And how can a mine-owner reach
      down to the men in the hole, make himself felt as a human
      being on the bottom floor of the hole in the ground?

      In a department store the employer expresses himself to his [253]
      clerks through everyone of the other twenty-five hundred; they
      mingle and stir their souls and hopes and fears together, and he
      expresses himself to all of them through them all.

      But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark
      hole in the ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes,
      are near by, with nothing but the dull sound of picks to come
      between. In thousands of other holes men work, each with
      his helper, all alone. The utmost the helper can do is to grow
      like the man he works with, or like his own pick, or like the
      coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost the man
      who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his
      helper.

      In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working
      hours, an employer can express himself and his humanness to
      his workman is through the steel machine he works with—
      through its being anew, good, fair machine or a poor one. He
      can only smile and frown at him with steel, be good to him
      in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a fore-
      man pacing down the aisles.

      The question the modern business man in a factory has to
      face is very largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring
      my will at my men. I have leather belts, printed rules, white
      steam, pistons, roar, air, water and fire and silence to express
      myself to my workmen in. I have long monotonous swings and
      sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron, strips of wood,
      bells, whistles, clocks—to express myself, to express my human
      spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way
      in which my factory with its machines can be made as human
      and as expressive of the human as a department store?"

      This is the question that our machine civilization has set
      itself to answer.

      All the men with good honest working imaginations, the
      geniuses and the freemen of the world, are setting themselves
      the task of answering it.

      Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will [254]
      take the machines away."

      Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines.
      We will make our inventions in men catch up with our inven-
      tions in machines."

      We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first
      chance. What is there an employer can do to draw out the
      latent force in the men, evoke the divine, incalculable passion
      sleeping beneath in the machine-walled minds, the padlocked
      wills, the dull unmined desires of men? How can he touch and
      wake the solar plexus of labour?

      If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of
      the most common type of workman, be an artist with him,
      express himself with him and change the nature of that sub-
      stance, give it a different colour or light or movement so that
      he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and
      healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit, and how
      is he going to do it?

      Most employers wish they could do this. If they could
      persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing
      to work with them instead of against them, they would do it.

      What form of language is there, whether of words or of
      actions, that an employer can use to make the men who work
      nine hours a day for him and to whom he has to express
      himself across acres of machines, believe in him and under-
      stand him?

      The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face,
      every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems
      crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door
      as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him—now with
      despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, "Do you
      believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human
      as a department store?"

      This question is going to be answered first by men who know
      what iron machines really are, and what they are really for,
      and how they work—who know what people-machines really [255]
      are, and what they are really for, and how they work. They
      will base all that they do upon certain resemblances and certain
      differences between people and machines.

      They will work the machines of iron according to the laws
      of iron.

      They will work the machines of men according to the laws
      of human nature.

      There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms
      and general principles concerning the natural working relation
      between men and machines, that it may be well to consider in
      the next chapter as a basis for a possible solution.

      What are our machines after all? How are the machines like
      us? And on what theory of their relation to us can machines
      and men expect in a world like this to run softly together?
      These are the questions men are going to answer next. In
      the meantime, I venture to believe that no man who is morose
      to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in
      our civilization—because they are machines—is likely to be
      able to do much to save the men in it.
 


      CHAPTER VIII

      THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD

      EVERY man has, according to the scientists, a place in the
      small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the
      soul of his body. All the little streets of the senses or avenues
      of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in
      this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small or a
      man's back.

      About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently
      make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his
      back.

      It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is
      supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious mem-
      ory of a whole human race, and it is here that the desires and
      the delights and labours of thousands of years of other people
      are turned off and turned on in him. It is the brain that has
      been given to every man for the heavy everyday hard work
      of living. The other brain, the one with which he does his
      thinking and which is kept in an honoured place up in the
      cupola of his being, is a comparatively light-working organ,
      merely his own private personal brain—a conscious, small, and
      supposably controllable affair. He holds on to his own partic-
      ular identity with it. The great lower brain in the small of
      his back is merely lent to him, as it were, out of eternity—while
      he goes by.

      It is like a great engine which he has been allowed the use of
      as long as he can keep it connected up properly with his cerebral
      arrangements.

      This appears to be mainly what the cerebral brain is for,
      this keeping the man connected up. It acts as a kind of stop- [257]
      cock for one's infinity, for screwing on or screwing off one's
      vast race-consciousness, one's all-humanityness, all those un-
      sounded deeps or reservoirs of human energy, of hope and
      memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly and heavenly
      desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for seventy
      years, by a whole human race.

      A human being is a kind of factory. The engine and the
      works and all the various machines are kept in the basement,
      and he sends down orders to them from time to time, and they
      do the work which has been conceived up in the headquarters.
      He expects the works down below to keep on doing these things
      without his taking any particular notice of them, while he
      occupies his mind, as the competent head of a factory should,
      with the things that are new and different and special and that
      his mind alone can do—the things which, at least in their
      present initial formative or creative stage, no machines as yet
      have been developed to do, and that can only be worked out
      by the man up in the headquarters himself personally, by the
      handiwork of his own thought.

      The more a human being develops, the more delicate, sensi-
      tive, strong, and efficient, the more spirit-informed once for all
      the machines in the basement are. As he grows, the various
      subconscious arrangements for discriminating, assimilating and
      classifying material, for pumping up power, light, and heat to
      headquarters, all of which can be turned on at will, grow more
      masterful every year. They are found all slaving away for
      him dimly down in the dark while he sleeps. They hand him
      up in his very dreams new and strange powers to live and
      know with.

      The men who have been the most developed of all, in this
      regard, civilization has always selected and set apart from the
      others. It calls these men, in their generation, men of genius.
      Ordinary men do not try to compete with men of genius.

      The reason that people set the genius apart and do not try
      to compete with him is that he has more and better machinery [258]
      than they have. It is always the first thing one notices about
      a man of genius—the incredible number of things that he
      manages to get done for him, apparently the things that he
      never takes any time off, like the rest of us, to do himself. The
      subconscious, automatic, mechanical equipment of his senses,
      the extraordinary intelligence and refinement of his body,
      the way his senses keep his spirit informed automatically
      and convey outer knowledge to him, the power he has in return
      of informing this outer knowledge with his spirit, with his will
      with his choices, once for all, so that he is always able afterward
      to rely on his senses to work out things beautifully for him quite
      by themselves, and to hand up to him, when he wants them,
      rare, deep, unconscious knowledge—all the things he wants
      to use for what his soul is doing at the moment—it is these
      that make the man of genius what he is. He has a larger and
      better factory than others, and has developed a huge subcon-
      scious service in mind and body. Having all these things done
      for him, he is naturally more free than others and has more
      vision and more originality, his spirit is swung free to build
      new worlds—to take walks with God, until at last we come to
      look upon him, upon the man of genius, a little superstitiously.

      We look up every little while from doing the things ourselves
      that he gets done for him by his subconscious machinery, and
      we wonder at him, we wonder at the strange, the mighty feats
      he does, at his thousand-leagued boots, at his apparent every-
      whereness. His songs and joys, sometimes, to us, his very
      sorrows, look miraculous.

      And yet it is all merely because he has a factory, a great
      automatic equipment, a thousand employee-sense perceptions,
      down in the basement of his being, doing things for him that
      the rest of us do, or think we are obliged to do ourselves, and
      give up all of our time to. He is not held back as we are, and
      moves freely. So he dives under the sea familiarly, or takes
      peeps at the farther side of the stars, or he flies in the air, or
      he builds unspeakable railroads or thinks out ships or sea-cities, [259]
      or he builds books, or he builds little new still-undreamed-of
      worlds out of chemistry, or he unravels history out of rocks,
      or plants new cities and mighty states without seeming to try,
      or perhaps he proceeds quietly to be interested in men, in all
      these funny little dots of men about him; and out of the earth
      and sky, out of the same old earth and sky everybody else had
      had, he makes new kinds and new sizes of men with a thought
      like some mighty, serene child playing with dolls!

      It is generally supposed that the man of genius rules history
      and dictates the ideals, the activities of the next generation,
      writes out the specifications for the joys and sorrows of a world,
      and lays the ground-plans of nations because he has an inspired
      mind. It is really because he has an inspired body, a body
      that has received its orders once for all, from his spirit. We
      would never wonder that everything a genius does has that vivid
      and strange reality it has, if we realized what his body is doing
      for him, how he has a body which is at work automatically
      drinking up the earth into everything he thinks, drinking up
      practicability, art and technique for him into everything he
      sees and everything he hopes and desires. And every year he
      keeps on adding a new body, keeps on handing down to his
      basement new sets, every day, of finer and yet finer things to
      do automatically. The great spiritual genius becomes great by
      economizing his consciousness in one direction and letting it
      fare forth in another. He converts his old inspirations into
      his new machines. He converts heat into power, and power
      into light, and comes to live at last as almost any man of genius
      can really be seen living—in a kind of transfigured or lighted-
      up body. The poet transmutes his subconscious or machine
      body into words; and the artist, into colour or sound or into
      carved stone. The engineer transmutes his subconscious body
      into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thought-
      ful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is
      seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some man's
      body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, [260]
      high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled
      up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of
      his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not
      as if he had had to work out every day all the old details of being
      a genius, himself.

      The miracles he seems to work are all made possible to him
      because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body,
      his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he
      had practically a thousand men all working for him, for
      dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get
      these men to attend to for him give him a start with which
      none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call
      him inspired because he is more mechanical than we are, and
      because his real spiritual life begins where our lives leave off.

      So the poets who have filled the world with glory and beauty
      have been free to do it because they have had more perfect,
      more healthful and improved subconscious senses handing up
      wonder to them than the rest of us have.

      And so the engineers, living, as they always live, with that
      fierce, silent, implacable curiosity of theirs, woven through
      their bodies and through their senses and through their souls,
      have tagged the Creator's footsteps under the earth, and along
      the sky, every now and then throwing up new little worlds to
      Him like His worlds, saying, "Look, O God, look at THIS!"
      —the engineers whose poetry is too deep to look poetic have
      all done what they have done because the unconscious and
      automatic gifts of their senses, of the powers of their observa-
      tion, have swung their souls free, given them long still reaches
      of thought and vast new orbits of desire, like gods.

      All the great men of the world have always had machinery.

      Now, everybody is having it. The power to get little things,
      innumerable, omnipresent, for-ever-and-ever things, tiny just-so
      things, done for us automatically so that we can go on to our
      inspirations is no longer to-day the special prerogative of men
      of genius. It is for all of us. Machinery is the stored-up [261]
      spirit, the old saved-up inspiration of the world turned on for
      every man. And as the greatness of a man turns on his com-
      mand over machinery, on his power to free his soul by making
      his body work for him, the greatness of a civilization turns
      upon its getting machines to do its work. The more of our
      living we can learn to do to-day, automatically, the more in-
      spired and creative and godlike and unmechanical our civiliza-
      tion becomes.

      Machinery is the subconscious mind of the world.