BOOK FIVE

      GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK


      CHAPTER II

      OXFORD STREET HUMS. THE HOUSE HEMS

      BUT it is not only because the members of the House of
      Commons are selected in a vague way or because they are
      a vague kind of men, that they fail to represent the people.

      The third reason against having a House of Commons try
      to compel business men to be good, by law, is its out-of-the-way
      position.

      The out-of-the-way position that a Parliament occupies in
      getting business men to be good, can be best considered,
      perhaps, by admitting at the outset that a government
      really is one very real and genuine way a great people
      may have of expressing themselves, of expressing what they
      are like and what they want, and that business is another
      way.

      Then the question narrows down. Which way of expressing
      the people is the one that expresses them the most to the point,
      and which expresses them where their being expressed counts
      the most?

      The people have a Government. And the people have Busi-
      ness.

      What is a Government for?

      What is Business for?

      Business is the occupation of finding out and anticipating
      what the wants of the English people really are and of finding
      out ways of supplying them.

      The business men on Oxford Street hire twenty or thirty
      thousand men and women, keep them at work eight or nine
      hours a day, five or six days in a week, finding out what the
      things are that the English people want and reporting on them [441]
      and supplying them.

      They are naturally in a strategic position to find out, not
      only what kinds of things the people want, but to find out, too,
      just how they want the things placed before them, what kind
      of storekeepers and manufacturers, salesmen and saleswomen
      they tolerate, like to deal with and prefer to have prosper.

      And the business men are not only in the most strategic
      and competent position to find out what the people who buy
      want, but to find out too, what the people who sell want. They
      are in the best position to know, and to know intimately, what
      the salesmen and saleswomen want and what they want to be
      and what they want to do or not do.

      They are in a close and watchful position, too, with regard
      to the conditions in the factories from which their goods come
      and with regard to what the employers, stockholders, foremen
      and workmen in those factories want.

      What is more to the point, these same business men, when
      they have once found out just what it is the people want, are
      the only men who are in a position, all in the same breath,
      without asking anybody and without arguing with anybody,
      without meddling or convincing anybody—to get it for
      them.

      Finding out what people want and getting it for them is
      what may be called, controlling business.

      The question not unnaturally arises with all these business
      men and their twenty or thirty thousand people working with
      them, eight or nine hours a day, five or six days a week, in
      controlling business, why should the members of the House
      of Commons expect, by taking a few afternoons or evenings
      off for it, to control business for them?

      If I were an employee and if what I wanted to do was to
      improve the conditions of labour in my own calling, I do not
      think I would want to take the time to wait several months,
      probably, to convince my member of Parliament, and then
      wait a few months more for him to convince the other members [442]
      of Parliament, and then vote his one vote. I would rather
      deal directly with my employer.

      If my employer is on my back and if I can once get the
      attention of my employer himself, as to where he is and as to
      how he is interrupting what I am doing for him—if I once
      get his attention and once get him to notice my back, he can
      get down. No one else can get down for him and no one else,
      except by turning a whole nation all around, can make him
      get down. Why should a man bother with T. P.'s Weekly or
      with Horatio Bottomley or with the Daily Mail or the Times,
      with a score of other people's by-elections all over England to
      lift his own employer off his back?

      There is a very simple rule for it.

      The way to lift one's employer off one's back is to make
      one's back so efficient that he cannot afford to be on it.

      The first thing I would do would be to see if I could not
      persuade my employer to take steps to train me and to make
      me efficient, himself. And perhaps the second thing I would
      try to do would be to wake my trades union up, to get my trades
      union to consent to let me want to try to be efficient and work
      as hard as I can, or to consent to my employer's hiring engineers
      to make me efficient. I would try to get my trades union to
      be interested in hiring itself some special expert like Frederick
      Taylor, some specialist in making a man do three times as much
      work with the same strength, making him three times as valu-
      able for his employer and three times as fit and strong for
      himself.

      This is what I would do if I wanted to make my employer
      good. I would be so good that he could not afford not being
      good too.

      If I were an employer, on the other hand, and understood
      human nature, and knew enough about psychology to found
      a great business house and wanted to make my employee good,
      or make him work three times as hard for me, with three times
      the normal strength, day by day, and have a normal old age [443]
      to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the House
      of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that
      I would be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly,
      and do it with more intimate knowledge of economy than the
      House of Commons could. And I would not have to convince
      several hundred men, men from rural counties, how I could
      improve my factory and get them to let me improve it. I
      could do it quietly by myself.

      In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a
      vision for every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made
      for him by some one else, or a vision he has made for himself,
      that fits in just where he is. In the last analysis our industrial
      success is going to lie in the sense of Here, and Me, and Now,
      raised to the nth power, in what might be called a kind of larger
      syndicalism.

      The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day,
      "We will take the factories out of our employers hands and
      run them ourselves," is going to say, "We will make ourselves
      fit to run the factories ourselves."

      What would please the employers more, give them a
      general, or national confidence in trying to run business and
      improve the conditions of work to-day, than to have their
      employees, suddenly, all over the nation, begin doing their
      work so well that they would be fit to run the factories?

      What is true of employers and employees in factories is still
      more true of the employers and employees in the great retail
      stores. If there is one thing rather than another the business
      men and women on Oxford Street, the managers, floor walkers
      and clerks all up and down the street are really engaged in all
      day all their lives, it is what might be called a daily nine-hour
      drill in understanding people. Why should employers and
      employees like these—experts in human nature—men who
      make their profession a success by studying human nature,
      and by working in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from
      the House of Commons and expect them to work out their [444]
      human problems better than they can do it?

      Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of
      people in all the world most competent to study together the
      working details of human nature, to act for themselves in
      self-respecting man-fashion and without whining at a nation.

      Who that they could hope to deal with and get what they
      want from, could know more about human nature than they do?
      Are they not the men of all others, all up and down that little
      strip of Oxford Street, who devote their entire time to human
      nature? They are in the daily profession of knowing the
      soonest and knowing the most about what people are like, and
      about what people will probably think. They are intimate
      with their peccadilloes in what they want to wear and in what
      they want to eat; they have learned their likes and dislikes in
      human nature; they know what they will support and what
      they will defy in human nature, in clerks, and in stores, and in
      storekeepers.

      And these things that they have learned about human nature
      (in themselves and other people) they have learned not by
      talking about human nature but by a grim daily doing things
      with it.

      These things being so, it would almost seem that these people
      and people like them were qualified to act, and as they happen
      to be in the one strategic position, both employers and employees
      alike, to act and to act for themselves and act directly and act
      together, it will not be very long, probably, before the nation
      will be very glad to have them do it.

      It is likely to be seen very soon (at least by all skilled Labour
      and all skilled Capital) that running out into the street and
      crying "Help!" and calling in some third person to settle
      family difficulties that can be better settled by being faced and
      thought out in private, is an inefficient and incompetent thing
      to do.

      And for the most part it is going to be only in the more
      superficial, inefficient, thoughtless industry that men, either [445]
      employers or employed, will be inclined to leave their daily
      work, run out wildly and drag in a House of Commons to help
      them to do right.

      I am only speaking for myself but certainly if I were an
      employer or an employee, I would not want to wait for an
      election a year away or to wait for the great engineering prob-
      lem of compelling my member of Parliament by my one vote
      to act for me.

      Perhaps workingmen in England and America are deceived
      about the value of voting as a means of improving conditions
      of workingmen. Possibly women are deceived about the value
      of voting as a means of improving the conditions of working
      women.

      Possibly a woman could do more behind a counter or by
      buying a store than by voting to have some man she has read
      about in a paper, improve business by talking about it in
      the House of Commons.

      . . . . . . .

      There is also a kind of program or vision of action one can use
      as a customer as well as an employer or employee.

      I might speak for myself.

      I have about so much money I spend every year in buy-
      ing things. I have proposed to study with my money every
      firm on which I spend it. I propose to take away my trade
      from the firm that does the least as it should and give it to
      the firm that does the most as it should. I will vote with my
      entire income and with every penny I save for the kind of
      employers I believe in and that I want, for the kind of
      employers who can earn and deserve and enjoy and keep
      the kind of salesmen and saleswomen I choose to do business
      with.

      All the year round, every firm with which I deal, I am going
      to study not only with my mind but. with my money. I will
      proceed to take my trade away from the big employers who [446]
      think that I want shoddy goods or who think that I want or
      am willing to trade with saleswomen who would let an employer
      impose on them, saleswomen that he thinks he can afford to
      impose upon. I will proceed to vote with my money, with
      every penny I have in the world, and I will earn more that
      I may vote more, for the kind of employer with whom I like
      to trade. And there shall not be a man, woman, or child
      of my acquaintance, if I can help it, or of my family's
      acquaintance who shall not know who these employers are by
      name and by address, the employers that I will trade with
      and the employers that I will not.

      This is my idea as a customer, as a member of the public,
      of the way for a people to express itself and to get what it
      wants.

      What I want may be said to be a kind of news, news about
      me so far as I go, as one member of the public. As I am only
      one person every item of the news is about me must be put
      where it works. I will deal directly with the news of what
      I want and I will convey that news, not to the House of
      Commons but to the men who have what I want and who can
      give it to me when they know it.

      News is the real government now and always of this world.

      When one has made up one's mind to tell this news, ob-
      viously the best art-form for telling news to employers and
      business men—the news of what we want and what we do
      not want and of what we want in them as well as in the things
      they sell, is to tell them the news in the language they have
      studied most, tell it to them in pounds, shillings, dollars, and
      cents, and by trading somewhere else.

      The gospel-bearing value, the news that one can get into a
      man's mind with one dollar, the news that he can be made to
      see and act on for one dollar—well, thinking of this some days,
      makes for me, at least, going up and down the Main Street
      of the World feeling my purse snuggling in my pocket, and all
      the people I can step up to with my purse and tell so many [447]
      dollars' worth of news to, tell that dollar's worth of gospel to
      about the world—makes going up and down with a dollar
      on a big business street, and spending it or not spending it,
      feel like a kind of chronic, easy, happy, going to Church.

      One always has a little money in one's pocket that one spends
      or that one won't spend, and sometimes even not spending a
      dollar, practised by some people, at just the right moment and
      in just the right way, can be made to mean as much and do
      as much with a world as spending a thousand dollars would
      without any meaning put into it.

      Sometimes I even go into a store on purpose, a certain kind
      of store I know will try to cheat me in a certain way, let them
      look a minute at the dollar they cannot have. Then I walk
      out with it quietly.

      I have said that the life-blood of my convictions shall cir-
      culate in my money and if I cannot express my soul, my religion,
      my gospel or news for this world, news about what I want and
      about what I will have in a world, if I cannot make every dollar,
      every shilling I earn, go through the world and sing my own
      little world-song in it, may I never have another shilling or
      earn another dollar as long as I live!

      The very sight of a dollar now whenever I see one once
      more, fills me with deep, hopeful working joy, thinking of what
      a bargain it is and how I can use it twice over, thinking of the
      dollar's worth of news, to say nothing of the dollar's worth of
      things that belong with a dollar!

      . . . . . . .

      For some generations, now, we have tried to make people
      good in a vague, general way, by using priests, sacraments and
      confessional boxes. For some centuries we have been trying
      to make people good with lawyers and juries and ballot boxes.
      We are now to try, at last, religion or gospel or news or ideals—
      practical, shrewd aimed ideals, that is, news to a man about
      himself or news about the man from the man himself to us. [448]

      In everything a man does he is expressing to us this news about
      himself, and about his world, and about his God. We are
      all telling news about the world and about ourselves all the
      time and we are all in a position for news all the time.

      What is it from hour to hour and day to day that we will do
      and we will not do?

      This news about us is the religion in us.

      The average man is coming to have very accurate ideas of
      late as to just where his religion is located. He has come to
      see that real religion in a man, very conveniently located
      (immediately at hand in him and personally directed), is his own
      action, his own divine "I will" or "I won't."

      He has come to be deeply attracted by this idea of a religion
      for every man just where he is, fitted on patiently, cheerfully,
      to just where he is, every day all day, his glorious, still, practical,
      good-natured, godlike "I will" and "I won't"—or News
      about himself.