BOOK FIVE

      GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


      PART TWO

      NEWS AND MONEY

      I THINK it was Sir William Lever who remarked (but I
      have heard in the last two years so many pearls dropped from
      the lips of millionaires that I am not quite sure) that the
      way to tell a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack
      of ready money. He added that perhaps a surer way
      of knowing a millionaire, when one saw one, was by his lack of
      ideas.

      My own experience is that neither of these ways works as
      well as it used to. I very often meet a man now—a real live
      millionaire, no one would think it of.

      One of them—one of the last ones—telegraphed me from
      down in the country one morning, swung up to London on a
      quick train, cooped me up with him at a little comer table in
      his hotel, and gave me more ideas in two hours than I had
      had in a week.

      I came away very curious about him—whoever he was.

      Not many days afterward I found myself motoring up a long,
      slow hill, full of wind and heather, and there in a stately park
      with all his treetops around him, and his own blue sky, in a big,
      beautiful, serene room, I saw him again.

      He began at once, "Do you think Christ would have approved
      of my house?"

      His five grown sons were sitting around him but he spoke
      vividly and directly and like a child, and as if he had just
      brushed sixty years away, and could, any time.

      I said I did not think it fair to Christ, two thousand years off,
      to ask what he would have thought of a house like his, now
      The only fair thing to do would be to ask what Christ would [423]
      think if He were living here to-day.

      "Well, suppose He had motored over here with you this
      afternoon from ____ Manor, and spent last night with you
      there, and talked with you and with ____ and had seen the
      pictures, and the great music room and wandered through the
      gardens, and suppose that then He had come through on his
      way up, all those two miles of slums down in ____ seen all
      those poor, driven, crowded people, and had finally come up
      here with you to this big, still, restful place two thousand people
      could live in, and which I keep all to myself. You don't really
      mean to say, do you, that He would approve of my living in a
      house like this?"

      I said that I did not think that Christ would be tipped over
      by a house or lose his bearings with a human soul because he
      lived in a park. I thought He would look him straight in
      the eyes.

      "But Christ said, 'He that loseth his life shall save it!'"

      "Yes, but He did not intend it as a mere remark about
      people's houses."

      It did not seem to me that Christ meant simply giving up
      to other people easy and ordinary things like houses or like
      money, but that He meant giving up to others our motives,
      giving up the deepest, hardest things in us, our very selves to
      other people.

      "And so you really think that if Christ came and looked at
      this house a,nd looked at me in it, He would not mind?"

      "I do not know. I think that after He had looked at your
      house He would go down and look at your factory, possibly.
      How many men do you employ?"

      "Sixteen hundred."

      "I think He would look at them, the sixteen hundred men,
      and then He would move about a little. Very likely He would
      look at their wives and the little children."

      He thought a moment. I could see that he was not as afraid
      of having Christ see the factory as he was of having Him see [424]
      the house.

      I was not quite sure but I thought there was a little faint
      gleam in his eye when I mentioned the factory.

      "What do you make?" I asked.

      He named something that everybody knows.

      Then I remembered suddenly who he was. He was one of the
      men I had first been told about in England, and the name had
      slipped from me. He had managed to do and do together the
      three things one goes about looking for everywhere in business
      —what might be called the Three R's of great business (though
      not necessarily R's). (1) He had raised the wages of his
      employees. (2) He had reduced prices to consumers. (3)
      He had reduced his proportion of profit and raised the income
      of the works, by inventing new classes of customers, and in-
      creasing the volume of the business.

      He had found himself, one day, as most men do, sooner or
      later, with a demand for wages that he could not pay.

      At first he told the men he could not pay them more, said that
      he would have to close the works if he did.

      He was a very busy man to be confronted with a crisis like
      this. The market was trouble enough.

      One morning, when he was up early, and the house was all
      still and he was sitting alone with himself, the thought slipped
      into his mind that there had been several times before in his life
      when he had sat thinking about certain things that could not be
      done. And then he had got up from thin king they could not
      be done and gone out and done them.

      He wondered if he could not get up and go out and do this
      one.

      As he sat in the stillness with a clear road before his mind
      and not a soul in the world up, the thought occurred to him,
      with not a thing in sight to stop it, that he had not really trained
      himself to be quite such an expert in raising wages as he had in
      some other things.

      Perhaps he did not know about raising wages. [425]

      Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting
      higher wages for his workmen as he had in those early days
      years before on making over all his obstinate raw material into
      the best cases of ____ on earth, he might find it possible to
      get more wages for his men by persuading them to earn more
      and by getting their cooperation in finding ways to earn more.

      As he sat in the stillness, gradually (perhaps it was the
      stillness that did it) the idea grew on him.

      He made up his mind to see what would happen if he worked
      as hard at paying higher wages for three months as he had for
      three years at making raw material into cases of the best ____
      on earth.

      Then things began happening every day. One of the most
      important happened to him.

      He found that higher wages were as interesting a thing to
      work on as any other raw material had ever been.

      He found that a cheap workman as raw material to make a
      high-priced workman out of was as interesting as a case of ____.

      A year or so after this, there was a strike (in his particular
      industry) of all the workmen in England. They struck to be
      paid the wages his men were paid.

      He had been able to do three things he thought he thought
      he could not do. He had succeeded in doing the first, in raising
      the wages of his employees, by thinking up original ways of
      expressing himself to them, and of getting them to believe in
      him and of making them want to work a third harder. At the
      same time he succeeded in doing the second, in reducing the
      prices to consumers, by inventing new by-products out of waste.

      He had succeeded in doing the third, in reducing his per cent. of
      profits and increasing his income from the works at the same
      time, by thinking up ways of creating new habits and new needs
      in his customers.

      He had fulfilled, as it seems, the three requisites of a great
      business career. He had created new workmen, invented new
      things for men and. women to want, had then created some new [426]
      men and women who could want them.

      Incidentally all the while, day by day, while he was doing
      these things, he had distributed a large and more or less un-
      expected sum of money among all these three classes of people.

      Some of this extra money went to his workmen, and some to
      himself, and some to his customers, but it was largely spent, of
      course, in getting business for other manufacturers and in getting
      people to buy allover England,from other manufacturers, things
      that such people as they had never been able before to afford
      to buy.

      . . . . . . .

      All these things that I have been saying and which I have duly
      confided to the reader flashed through my mind as I stood with
      my back to the fire, realizing suddenly that the man who had
      done them was the man with whom I was talking.

      Possibly some little thing was said. I do not remember what.
      The next thing I knew was that, with his five grown sons
      around him, he returned to his attack on his house.

      He said some days he was glad it was so far away. He did
      not want his workmen to see it. He did not go to the mill
      often in his motor-car, not when he could help it.

      I said that I thought that a man who was doing extra-
      ordinary things for other people, things that other men could
      not get time or strength or freedom or boldness of mind or
      initiative to do, that any particular thing he could have that
      gave him any advantage or immunity for doing the extraordin-
      ary things better, that would give him more of a chance to give
      other people a chance, that the other people, if they were in their
      senses, would insist upon his having these things.

      "I think there are hundreds of men in my mill who think that
      they ought to have my motor-car and three or four rooms in
      this house.

      "Are they the most efficient ones?"

      "No." [427]

      If a man gives over to other people—his deepest motives,
      and and if he really identifies himself—the very inside of
      himself with them and treats their interests as his interests,
      the more money he has, the more people like it.

      "Take me, for instance," I said.

      "I have hoped every minute since I knew you, that you
      were a prosperous man. I saw the house and looked around in
      the park as I motored up with joy. And when I came to the
      big gate I wanted to give three cheers! I wish you had stock
      in the Meat Trust in America, that you could pierce your way
      like a microbe into the vitals, into the inside of the Meat Trust
      in my own country, make a stand in a Directors' Meeting for
      ninety million people over there, say your say for them, vote
      your stock for them, say how you want a Meat Trust you belong
      to, to behave, how you want it to be a big, serious, business insti-
      tution and not a humdrum, mechanical-minded hold-up any-
      body could think of—in charge of a few uninteresting, inglori-
      ous men—men nobody really cares to know and that nobody
      wants to be like. . . . . when I think of what a man like you
      with money can do . . . . . !

      "Am I not tired every day, are you not tired, yourself, of
      going about everywhere and seeing money in the hands of all
      these second-class, socially feeble-minded men, of seeing col-
      umns in the papers of what such men think, of having college
      presidents, great universities, domes, churches and thousands
      of steeples all deferring to them and bowing to them, and all
      the superior, live, interested people ringing their door bells for
      their money waiting outside on benches for what they think?

      I do not believe that Christ came into the world, two thousand
      years ago, to say that only the men who have minds of the
      second class,men who are not far-sighted enough in business to
      be decently unselfish in this world, should be allowed to have
      control of the money and of the peoples' means of living in it.

      We are living in an age of big machines and big, inevitable
      aggregations, and to say in an age like this, and above all, to [428]
      get it out of a Bible, or put it into a hymn book or make a
      religion of it, that all the first class minds of the world—the
      men who see far enough to be unselfish, should give over their
      money to second-class men, is the most monstrous, most un- 
      believing, unfaithful, unbiblical, irreligious thing a world can be
      guilty of. The one thing that is now the matter with money,
      is that the second-class people have most of it.

      "What would happen if we applied asceticism or a tired, dis-
      couraged unbelief to having children that we do to having
      pounds and pence and dollars and cents? You would not
      stand for that would you?"

      I looked at his five sons.

      "Suppose all the good families of to-day were to take the
      ground that having children is a self-indulgence unworthy of
      good people; suppose the good people leave having children
      in this world almost entirely to bad ones?

      "This is what has been happening to money.

      "Unbelief in money is unbelief in the spirit. It is paying too
      much attention to wealth to say that one must or that one must
      not have it."

      I cannot recall precisely what was said after this in that long
      evening talk of ours but what I tried to say perhaps might have
      been something like this:

      The essence of the New Testament seems to be the emphasis
      of a man's spirit with or without money. Whether a man
      should be rich or get out of being rich and earn the right to be
      poor (which some very true and big men, artists and inventors
      in this world will always prefer) turns on a man's temperament.
      If a man has a money genius and can so handle money that he
      can make money, and if he can, at the same time, and all in one
      bargain, express his own spirit, if he can free the spirits of other
      men with money and express his religion in it, he should be
      ostracized by all thoughtful, Christian people, if in the des-
      perate crisis of an age like this, he tries to get out of being rich.
      The one thing a man can be said to be for in this world, is to [429]
      express the goodness—the religion in him, in something, and
      if he is not the kind of man who can express his religion in money
      and in employing labour, then let him find something—say
      music or radium or painting in which he can. It is this bound-
      ing off in a world, this making a bare spot in life and saying
      "This is not God, this cannot be God!"—it is this alone
      that is sacrilegious.

      . . . . . . .

      It may be that I am merely speaking for myself, but I did
      discover a man on Fleet Street the other day who quite agreed
      with me apparently, that if the thing a man has in him is religion
      he can put it up or express it in almost anything.

      This man had tried to express his idea in a window.

      He had done a Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," in sugar
      —a kind of bas-relief in sugar.

      I do not claim that this kind of foolish, helpless caricature
      of a great spiritual truth filled me with a great reverence
      or that it does now.

      But it did make me think how things were.

      If sugar with this man, like money with a banker, was the
      one logical thing the man had to express his religion in, or if
      what he had had to express had been really true and fine, or if
      there had been a true or fine or great man to express, I do not
      doubt sugar could have been made to do it.

      One single man with enough money and enough religious
      skill in human nature, who would get into the Sugar Trust with
      some good, fighting, voting stock, who could make the Sugar
      Trust do as it would be done by, would make over American
      industry in twenty years.

      He would have thrown up as on a high mountain, before all
      American men, one great specimen, enviable business. He
      would have revealed as in a kind of deep, sober apocalypse,
      American business to itself. He would have revealed American
      business as a new national art form, as an expression of the [430]
      practical religion, the genius for real things, that is our real
      modern temperament in America and the real modern tempera-
      ment in all the nations.

      Of course it may not need to be done precisely with the
      Sugar Trust.

      The Meat Trust might do it first, or the Steel Trust.

      But it will be done.

      Then the Golden Rule, one great Golden Rule-machine
      having been installed in our trust that knew the most, and was
      most known, it could be installed in the others.

      Religion can be expressed much better to-day in a stock-
      holder's meeting than it can in a prayer-meeting.

      Charles Cabot, of Boston, walked in quietly to the Stock-
      holder's Meeting of the Steel Trust one day and with a
      little touch of money—$2,900 in one hand, and a copy of
      the American Magazine in the other, made (with $2,900)
      $1,468,000,000 do right.