BOOK FIVE

      GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


      To Anybody

      "I know that all men ever born are also my brothers. . . .
      Limitless leaves too, stiff or drooping in the fields,

      And brown ants in the little wells beneath them

      And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elders,
      mulleins and poke weed."

      A Child said, "What is grass?" fetching it to me with full
      hands.

      How could I answer the Child?

      ————

      "I want to trust the sky and the grass!

      I want to believe the songs I hear from the fenceposts!

      Why should a maple-bud mislead me?"



      PART ONE

      NEWS AND LABOUR

      A BIG New England factory, not long ago, wanted to get
      nearer its raw material and moved to Georgia.

      All the machine considerations, better water-power, cheaper
      labour, smaller freight bills, and new markets had argued for
      moving to Georgia.

      Long rows of new mills were built and thousands of negroes
      were moved in and thousands of shanties were put up, and the
      men and the women stood between the wheels. And the
      wheels turned.

      There was not a thing that had not been thought of except
      the men and women that stood between the wheels.

      The men and women that stood between the wheels were, for
      the most part, strong and hearty persons and they never looked
      anxious or abused and did as they were told.

      And when Saturday night came, crowds of them with their
      black faces, of the men and of the women, of the boys and girls,
      might have been seen filing out of the works with their week's
      wages.

      Monday morning a few of them dribbled back. There were
      enough who would come to run three mills. All the others in
      the long row of mills were silent. Tuesday morning, Number
      Four started up, Wednesday, Number Five. By Thursday
      noon they were all going.

      The same thing happened the week after, and the week after,
      and the week after that.

      The management tried everything they could think of with
      their people, scolding, discharging, making their work harder,
      making their work easier, paying them less, paying them more, [414]
      two Baptist ministers and even a little Roman Catholic Church.
      As long as the negroes saw enough to eat for three days, they
      would not work.

      It began to look as if the mills would have to move back to
      Massachusetts, where people looked anxious and where people
      felt poor, got up at 5 A.M. Mondays and worked.

      Suddenly one day, the son of one of the owners, a very new-
      looking young man who had never seen a business college, and
      who had run through Harvard almost without looking at a book,
      and who really did not seem to know or to care anything about
      anything—except folks—appeared on the scene with orders
      from his father that he be set to work.

      The manager could not imagine what to do with him at first,
      but finally, being a boy who made people like him more than
      they ought to, he found himself placed in charge of the Company
      Store. The company owned the village, and the Company
      Store, which had been treated as a mere necessity in the lonely
      village, had been located, or rather dumped, at the time, into
      a building with rows of little house-windows in it, a kind of extra
      storehouse on the premises.

      The first thing the young man did was to stove four holes in
      the building, all along the front and around the comers on the
      two sides, and put in four big plate-glass windows. The store
      was mysteriously closed up in front for a few days to do this,
      and no one could see what was happening, and the negroes slunk
      around into a back room to buy their meal and molasses. And
      finally one morning, one Sunday morning, the store opened up
      bravely and flew open in front.

      The windows on the right contained three big purple hats
      with blue feathers, and some pink parasols.

      The windows on the left were full of white waistcoats, silver-
      headed canes, patent-leather shoes and other things to live up to.
      Monday morning more of the mills were running than usual.

      Later in the week there appeared in the windows melodions,
      phonographs, big gilt family Bibles, bread machines, sewing [415]
      machines, and Morris chairs. Only a few hands took their
      Mondays off after this.

      All the mills began running all the week.

      . . . . . . .

      Of course there are better things to live for than purple hats
      and blue feathers, and silver-headed canes, and patent leather
      shoes. But if people can be got to live six days ahead, or thirty
      days, or sixty days ahead,instead of three days ahead, by purple
      hats and blue feathers and white waistcoats,and if it is necessary
      to use purple hats and blue feathers to start people thinking in
      months instead of minutes, or to budge them over to where they
      can have a touch of idealism or of religion or of living beyond
      the moment, I say for one, with all my heart, "God bless purple
      hats and blue feathers!"

      . . . . . . .

      The great problem of modern charity, the one society is
      largely occupied with to-day, is: "What is there that we can
      possibly do for our millionaires?"

      The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design
      and set up purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.

      The moment our millionaires have placed before them some-
      thing to live for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid
      lasting things they can do, things that everybody else would
      want to do, and that everybody else would envy them for doing,
      it will bore them to run a great business merely to make money.
      They will find it more interesting, harder, and calling for greater
      genius, to be great and capable employers. When our million-
      aires once begin to enter into competition with one another in
      being the greatest and most successful employers of labour on
      earth, our industrial wars will cease.

      Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees
      as they dare, and pay them as little as they can, and who give
      the public as small values as they dare, and take as much money [416]
      as they can, only do such stupid, humdrum, conventional
      things because they are bored, because they cannot really
      think of anything to live for.

      Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing
      how much less work a day than they ought to do, they can do,
      and how much more money they can get out of their employers
      than they earn, only do such things because they are tired or
      bored and discouraged, and because they cannot think of any-
      thing that is truly big and fine and worth working for.

      The industrial question is not an economic question. It
      is a question of supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem
      which only an American National Ideal Supply Company could
      hope to handle. The very first moment three or four purple hat
      with blue feathers for millionaires and for labourers have been
      found and set up in the great show window of the world, the
      industrial unrest of this century begins to end.

      . . . . . . .

      As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys
      playing house—marking off rooms—sitting-rooms and bed-
      rooms, with rows of stones on the ground. When I came up
      they had just taken hold of a big stone they wanted to lift over
      into line a little. They were tugging on it hopefully and with
      very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up a small beam
      about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought
      would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum
      for them, and went on with my walk. When I came back
      after my walk that night to the place where the boys had been
      playing, I found the boys had given up working on their house.
      And as I looked about, every big stone for yards around—every
      one that was the right size—seemed subtly out of place. The
      top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.

      They had given up playing house and had played crowbar
      all day instead.
      I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, [417]
      those boys' first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just
      a little time off for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!

      I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch
      more on a crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But
      I know people and I know that a man with only three day's
      worth of things ahead to live for does not get one hundredth
      part of the purchase power on what he is doing that the man gets
      who works with thirty days ahead of things to live for, all of
      them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and inspiring him.
      And I know that the man who does his work with a longer
      lever still, with thirty or forty years worth, of things he wants,
      all crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things
      so easily, so even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many
      of us sometimes to be a new size and a new kind of man.

      . . . . . . .

      The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a
      man more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if
      a business man has the brains, knows how to fire up an employee,
      knows how to give him something or suggest something in his life
      that will make him want to live twenty times as much, it would
      not only be cheaper, but it would work better than paying him
      twice as much wages.

      Efficiency is based on news. Put before a man's life twenty
      times as much to live for and to work for, and he will do at least,
      well—twice as much work.

      If a man has a big man's thing or object in view, he can do
      three times as much work. If the little thing he has to do, and
      keep doing, is seen daily by him as a part of a big thing, the
      power and drive of the big thing is in it, the little thing becomes
      the big thing, seems big while he is doing it every minute. It
      makes it easier to do it because it seems big.

      The little man becomes a big man.

      From the plain, practical point of view, it is the idealist in
      business, the shrewd, accurate, patient idealist in modern busi- [418]
      ness who is the man of economic sense. The employer who can
      put out ideals in front of his people, who can make his people
      efficient with the least expense, is the employer who has the
      most economic sense.

      The employer who is a master at supplying motives to people,
      who manages to cut down through to the quick in his employees,
      to the daily motives, to the hourly ideals, the hourly expecta-
      tions with which they work, is the employer who already takes
      the lead, who is already setting the pace in the twentieth-century
      business world.

      Possibly you have noticed this trait in the great employers
      or, at least, in the great managers of employers?

      You are going, for instance, through a confectionery shop.
      As you move down the long aisles of candy machines you hear
      the clock strike eleven. Suddenly music starts up all around you
      and before your eyes four hundred girls swing off into each
      other's arms. They dance between their machines five min-
      utes, and then, demurely, they drop back to their work. You
      see them sitting quietly in long white rows, folding up sweet-
      meats with flushed and glowing cheeks.

      Is this sentiment or is it cold businesslike efficiency?

      The more sentiment there is in it, I think, the more efficient
      it is and the better it works.

      "Business is not business."

      One need not quarrel about words, but certainly, whatever
      else business is, it is not business. It would be closer to the
      facts to call business an art or a religion, a kind of homely,
      inspired, applied piety, based upon gifts in men which are
      essentially religious gifts; the power of communion in the human
      heart, the genius for cultivating companionship, of getting
      people to understand you and understand one another and do
      team work. The bed-rock, the hard pan of business success
      lies in the fundamental, daily conviction—the personal
      habit in a man of looking upon business as a hard, ac-
      curate, closely studied, shrewd human art, a science of mutual [419]
      expectation.

      I am not saying that I would favour all employers of young
      women having them, to-morrow morning at eleven o'clock,
      swing off into each other's arms and dance for five minutes. The
      value of the dance in this particular case was that the Firm
      thought of the dancing itself and was always doing things like
      it, that everybody knew that the Firm, up in its glass office, felt
      glad, joined in the dance in spirit, enjoyed seeing the girls caught
      up for five minutes in the joy and swing of a big happy world
      full of sunshine and music outside, full of buoyant and gentle
      things, of ideals around them which belonged to them and of
      which they and their lives were a part.

      When we admit that business success to-day turns or is begin-
      ning to turn on a man's power of getting work out of people, we
      admit that a man's power of getting work out of people, his
      business efficiency, turns on his power of supplying his people
      with ideals.

      Ideals are news.

      You come on a man who thinks he is out of breath and that
      he cannot possibly run. You happen to be able to tell him
      that some dynamite in the quarry across the road is going to
      blow the side of the hill out in forty-five seconds and he will
      run like a gazelle.

      You tell a man the news, the true news that his employees are
      literally and honestly finding increased pay or promotion,
      either in their own establishment or elsewhere for every man
      they employ, as fast as he makes himself fit, and you have
      created a man three times his own size before your own eyes, all
      in a minute. And he begins working for you like a man three
      times his own size, and not because he is getting more for it, but
      because he suddenly believes in you, suddenly believes in the
      world and in the human race he belongs to.

      To make a man work, say something to him or do something
      to him which will make him swing his hat for humanity, and
      give three cheers (like a meeting of workmen the other day): [420]
      "Three cheers for God!"

      There is a well-known firm in England which has the best
      labour of its kind in the world, because the moment the Firm
      finds that a man's skill has reached the uttermost point in his
      work, where it would be to the Firm's immediate interests to
      keep him and where the Firm could keep on making money out
      of him and where the man could not keep on growing, they have
      a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen
      every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere,
      finding him a better place and sending him to it. This is a
      regular system and highly organized. The factory is known or
      looked upon as a big family or school. There are hundreds of
      young men and young women who, in order to get in and get
      started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory, would
      offer to work for the firm for nothing. The Factory, to them, is
      like a great Gate on the World.

      It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on
      the World.

      And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself.

      News to a man about himself and about what he can be, is
      gospel.

      And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about
      human nature to do things like this, men who can tell people
      news about themselves, all day, every day, all the week, like a
      church—let such a factory, I say, for one, have a steeple
      with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be counted with the other
      churches!

      People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind
      of weak, pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour
      by schoolgirls, as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead
      of being fierce, splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable
      in human history, trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing
      wonder, deaths, births upon the world, carrying everything
      before them, everywhere they go. These are ideals! This
      may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a year, but [421]
      it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they make
      a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for,
      to make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With
      the men who are most alive and who live the longest, the men
      who live farther ahead and think in longer periods of time, the
      energies in ideals function as an everyday matter of course.

      I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what
      he lives for, as his motive powers. They generally speak of
      motives in a man as if they were a mere kind of dead chart or
      spiritual geography in him, or clock-hand on him or map of his
      soul. The motives and desires in a man are the motors or
      engines in him, the central power house in a man, the thing
      in him that makes him go.

      All a man has to do to live suddenly and unexpectedly a big
      life is to have suddenly a big motive.

      Anybody who has ever tried, for five minutes, a big motive,
      ever tried working a little happiness for other people into what
      he is doing for himself, for instance, if he stopped to think
      about it and how it worked and how happy it made him himself,
      would never do anything in any other way all his life. It is
      the big motives that are efficient.