BOOK THREE

      LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL


      CHAPTER IX

      THE GROUND FLOOR FOLKS

      I WOULD not have, if I could afford it, a thing in my house
      that is not hand-made. I have come to believe that machinery
      is going to make it possible for everybody to have hand-made
      things in their homes, things that have been made by people
      who love to make them, and by people who, thanks to the ma-
      chines, are soon bound to have time to make them. Some
      will have gifts for hand-made furniture, others for hand-made
      ideas. Perhaps people will even have time for sitting down to
      enjoy hand-made ideas, to enjoy hand-made books—and enjoy
      reading books by hand. We may have time for following an
      author in a book in the slow, old, deep, loving, happy, hand-
      made fashion we used to know—when we have enough ma-
      chines.

      It looks as if it might be something like this.

      Every man is going to spend his mornings in the basement
      of society, taking orders and being a servant and executing
      automatically, like a machine if need be, the will of the world,
      making what the world wants in the way it wants it, expressing
      society and subordinating himself. In the afternoon he shall
      come up out of the basement, and take his stand on the ground
      floor of the world, stop being a part of the machinery, and be
      a man, express himself and give orders to himself and do
      some work he loves to do in the way he loves to do it, express
      his soul in his labour, and be an artist. He will not select his
      work in the morning, or select his employer, or say how the work
      shall be done. He will himself be selected, like a young tree
      or like an iron nail, because he is the best made and best fitted
      thing at hand to be used in a certain place and in a certain [263]
      way.

      When the man has been selected for his latent capacities,
      his employer sets to work on him scientifically and according
      to the laws of physics, hygiene, conservation of energy, the
      laws of philosophy, human nature, heredity, psychology, and
      even metaphysics, teaches the man how to hold his hands, how
      to lift, how to sit down, how to rest, and how to breathe, so that
      three times as much work can be got out of him as he could
      get out of himself. A mind of the highest rank and, if necessary,
      thirty minds of the highest rank, shall be at his disposal, shall
      be lent him to show him how his work can be done. The
      accumulated science and genius, the imagination and ex-
      perience, of hundreds of years, of all climates, of all countries,
      of all temperaments shall be heaped up by his employers,
      gathered about the man's mind, wrought through his limbs,
      and help him to do his work.

      All labour down in the basement of society shall be skilled
      labour. The brains of men of genius and of experts shall be
      pumped into labour from above until every man in the base-
      ment shall earn as much money in three hours a day as he
      formerly had earned in nine.

      Between the time a man saves by having machinery and the
      time he saves by having the brains of great men and geniuses
      to work with, it will be possible for men to do enough work for
      other people down in the basement of the world in a few hours
      to shut the whole basement up, if we want to, by three o'clock.

      Every man who is fit for it shall spend the rest of his time in
      planning his work himself and in expressing himself, and in
      creating hand-made and beautiful, inspired and wilful things
      like an artist, or like a slowed-down genius, or at least like a
      man or like a human being.

      Every man owes it to society to spend part of his time in
      expressing his own soul. The world needs him. Society can-
      not afford to let him merely give to it his feet and his hands.
      It wants the joy in him, the creative desire in him, the slow, [264]
      stupid, hopeful initiative, in him to help run the world. Society
      wants to use the man's soul too—the man's will. It is going
      to demand the soul in a man, the essence or good-will in him,
      if only to protect itself, and to keep the man from being
      dangerous. Men who have lost or suppressed their souls, and
      who go about cursing at the world every day they live in it, are
      not a safe, social investment.

      But while every man is going to see that he owes it to society
      to use a part of his time in it in expressing himself, his own
      desires, in his own way, he is going to see also that he owes it
      to society to spend part of his time in expressing others and
      in expressing the desires and the needs of others. The two
      processes could be best effected at first probably by alternating,
      by keeping the man in equilibrium, balancing the mechanical
      and the spiritual in his life. Eventually and ideally, he will
      manage to have time in a higher state of society to put them
      together, to express in the same act at the same time, and not
      alternating or reciprocally, himself and others. And he will
      succeed in doing what the great and free artist does already.
      He will make his individual self-expression so great and so
      generous that it is also the expression of the universal self.

      Every man will be treated according to his own nature.
      Doubtless some men have not brains enough in a week to supply
      them for one hour a day of self-directed work. It would take
      them five hours a day to think how to do one hour's worth of
      work. Men who prefer, as many will, not to think, and who
      like the basement better, can substitute in the basement for
      their sons, and buy if they like, the freedom of sons who prefer
      thinking, who would like to work harder than their fathers
      would care to work, up on the ground floor of the world. But
      as time goes on, it is to be hoped that every man will climb up
      slowly, and will belong less and less of his time to the staff
      that borrows brains, and more and more of his time to the staff
      that hands brains down, and that directs the machinery of the
      world. The time of alternation in dealing with different call- [265]
      ings will probably be adjusted differently, and might be made
      weeks instead of days, but the principle would be the same.

      The forces that are going to help, apparently, in this evolution
      will be the labour exchange—the centre for the mobilization
      of labour, the produce exchange, the inventor's spirit in the
      labour unions and employers' associations, and the gradual
      organization by inventors of the common vision of all men,
      and setting it at work on the supreme task of modern life—
      the task of drawing out, evoking each particular man in the
      world, and in behalf of all, freeing him for his own particular
      place.
 


      CHAPTER X

      THE MACHINE-TRAINERS

      THE fundamental failure of humanity so far is in self-asser-
      tion.

      The essential distinctive trait of modern civilization is
      machinery.

      Machinery logically and irrevocably involves the cooperative
      action of individuals.

      If we make levers and iron wheels work by putting them
      together according to their nature, we can only make vast
      masses of men work by putting them together according to
      their nature.

      So far we have been trying to make vast masses of men work
      together in precisely the same way we make levers and iron
      wheels work together. We have thought we could make diabol-
      ically, foolishly, insanely inflexible men-machines which violate
      at every point the natural qualities and instincts of the materials
      of which they are made.

      We have failed to assert ourselves against our iron machines.
      We have let our iron machines assert themselves against us.
      We have let our iron machines be models for us. We have
      overlooked the difference in the nature of the materials in
      machines of iron and machines of men.

      A man is a self-reproducing machine, and an iron machine
      is one that has to be reproduced by somebody else.

      In a man-machine arrangements must be made so that each
      man can be allowed to be the father of his own children and the
      author of his own acts.

      In society or the man-machine, if it is to work, men are
      individuals. Society is organically, irrevocably dependent [267]
      upon each man, and upon what each man chooses according
      to his own nature to do himself.

      The result is, the first principle of success in constructing and
      running a social machine is to ask and to get an answer out of
      each man who is, as we look him over and take him up, and
      propose to put him into it, "What are you like?" "What are
      you especially for?" "What do you want?" "How can you
      get it?"

      Our success in getting him properly into our machine turns
      upon a loyal, patient, imperious attention on our part to what
      there is inside him, inside the particular individual man, and
      how we can get him to let us know what is inside, get him to
      decide voluntarily to let us have it, and let us work it into the
      common end.

      In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine
      civilization which we have been piling up around us for a
      hundred years we have made machines out of every-
      thing, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the
      machines we have made is the machine we have made out of
      ourselves.

      Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead,
      or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines
      or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that
      we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves.

      Man-machines are produced by putting up possible lives before
      particular individual men, and letting them find out (and finding
      out for ourselves, too), day by day, into which life they will
      grow up.

      Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really
      works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals:
      upon drawing out the aptitudes and motives, choices and genius
      in each man; the passion, if he has any; the creative desire, the
      self-expressing, self-reproducing, inner manhood; the happy
      strength there is in him.

      Trades unions overlook this, and treat all men alike and all [268]
      employers alike. Employers have very largely overlooked it.

      It is the industrial, social, and religious secret of our modern
      machine civilization. We need not be discouraged about
      machines, because the secret of the machine civilization has
      as yet barely been noticed.

      The elephants are running around in the garden. But they
      have merely taken us by surprise. It is their first and their
      last chance. The men about us are seeing what to do. We are
      to get control of the elephants, first, by getting control of our-
      selves. We are beginning to organize our people-machines as if
      they were made of people; so that the people in them can keep
      on being people, and being better ones. And as our people-
      machines begin to become machines that really work, our iron
      machines will no longer be feared. They will reach over and
      help. As we look about us we shall see our iron machines at
      last, about all the world, all joining in, all hard at work for us
      a million, million machines a day making the crowd beautiful.