BOOK ONE

      CROWDS AND MACHINES


      CHAPTER IV

      THE STRIKE—AN INVENTION FOR MAKING
      CROWDS THINK

      WHEN I was arranging to slip over from New York and get
      something I very much wanted in England last spring, I found
      myself held up suddenly ill all my plans because some men on
      the docks had decided that there was something that they
      wanted too. They decided that I and thousands of other
      people in New York would have to wait over on the shores of
      America until they got it.

      After postponing my plans until things had settled down, I
      took passage, and in due time found myself standing on Eng-
      lish soil, only to be informed that, while I might be allowed per-
      haps at least to stand on English soil, that was really as much as
      I could expect. I could not go anywhere because a number of
      men on the railways had decided that there was something they
      wanted and that I would have to wait till they got it.

      I could go down and look at t4e silent, cold locomotives on
      the rails, and I could be as wistful and hopeful as I liked
      about getting up to London, but these men had decided that
      there was something that they wanted and I must wait
      I could not think of anything I had ever done to these men,
      and what had Liverpool and London done to them?

      After I was duly settled in London, and had begun to get into
      its little ways, and was busily driving about and attending to
      my business as I had planned, 6,000 more men suddenly wanted
      something, brought me up to a full stop one rainy day, and said
      that they had decided that if I wanted to ride I would have to
      walk, or that I would have to poke dismally about in a 'bus, or
      worm my way through under the ground. As I understood it, [50]
      there was something that they wanted and something that
      they were going to get; and while of course in away, they
      recognized that there might be something that I wanted too, I
      would have to wait till they got theirs.

      I could not think of anything I had ever done to them, nor
      could I see what the thousands of other good people in London
      that I saw walking and puddling about, or watched waiting
      twenty minutes or so with long, hopeful, dogged whistles for
      cabs, had done to them.

      A few days more, and my morning paper tells me suddenly of
      some more men who wanted something—this time up in
      Lancashire. They had decided that they wouldn't let some
      two or three hundred thousand other men go to their work until
      they got it. They hushed cities to have their own way. Day
      by day I watched them throwing the silence of the cities in their
      employers' faces, closing shops, closing up railroads, telling
      the world it must pay more for the clothes on its back, and all
      because—a certain Mr. and Mrs. Riley of Accrington, North
      Lancashire did not like or did not think that they liked, the
      North Lancashire Trades Union. (The general idea seemed to
      be to have all the others join in, everywhere—fifty-four mil-
      lion spindles, and four hundred and forty thousand looms—and
      wait and keep perfectly still. until Mr. and Mrs. Riley could
      make up their minds.

      And now this present week, morning after morning I take up
      my paper and read that 500,000 miners want something. I
      look in my fire dubiously day by day. I may have to go home
      to America in a few weeks to get warm.

      Of course it is only fair to say at the outset that this little
      series of impressions, or sketches, as one may say, of Civilization
      as I have seen it since arriving in England are of such a nature
      that I need not have come over to England to observe them.

      I would be the last to deny that the same conveniences for
      being disagreeable and for getting in the way and for making a
      general muss of Life can be offered almost any time in my own [51]
      hopeful and blundering country.

      What more immediately concerns me in these things is that,
      having happened, there can be no doubt that they have some
      valuable and worthy meaning for me and for other people that
      I ought to get out of them.

      One cannot stand by and see a great civilization like our Eng-
      lish-speaking civilization, with its ocean liners, cathedrals, and
      aeroplanes, being undignified and inefficient before one's eyes
      and even a little ridiculous, without trying to see if it does not
      serve some purpose. There must be something beyond, some-
      thing further and deeper, something newborn about it, which
      shall be worth our while. Strikes seem to be common people's
      way of thinking things out. If they had more imagination, they
      would know what they were going to think beforehand, without
      so much trouble perhaps; but so long as they have not, and so
      long as it is really true perhaps that all these millions of levers
      and wheels and engines will have to be stopped, so that the
      rich mechanical-minded people who own them and the poor
      mechanical-minded people who work with them can think
      better, we will have to be glad at least that they are thinking,
      and we will have to hope that they are thinking fast, and will
      soon have it over with. In the meantime, while they are
      thinking, we can think too.

      It is never fair to lump people together, and there are always
      exceptions and special reasons to consider; but, speaking roughly,
      it is fair to lay it down as a general principle that it is apt to be
      the more common kind of employers and employees who find it
      difficult to think, and who need strikes to think with. When
      we see 175,000 weavers striking in Lancashire, and the Trades
      Unions insisting on the discharge of Non-Union men, and
      employers being willing to recognize the Unions but being un-
      willing to be controlled by them, most of us find ourselves tak-
      ing sides very quickly. We are often amazed to see how quickly
      we take sides, and what amazes some of us most is our apparent
      inconsistency. We find ourselves now on the Union side and [52]
      now on the employer side in the dispute between Capital and
      Labour. We never know when we take up the morning paper,
      some of us, which side will be our next; and very often, if we
      were suddenly asked why, on reading quietly about a new dis-
      pute in the morning paper, we had taken promptly one side
      rather than the other, almost unconsciously, before we knew it
      we would not perhaps be able to say at once. The other day I
      became a little alarmed at myself at what looked at first like a
      kind of moral weakness, and inability to stand still on one side
      or the other in the contest between Labour and Capital; and
      I tried to think my way sternly through, and decide why it was
      my mind seemed to waver from one side to the other, and seemed
      so inconsistent and inefficient.

      It seems to me I have just discovered a certain thread of
      consistency, as I look back over many disputes.

      As near as I can remember, I find the side that uses force, or
      that uses the most force, invariably turns me against it. If,
      as I read, I find that both sides are using force, I find myself
      against both sides. I find myself wishing, in spite of my dis-
      like of Socialism, that the nation had the power, when a quarrel-
      some industry turns to the people in the street and stops them
      in what they are doing, and tells the people in the street that
      they cannot ride, or that they shall not sleep, or that they can-
      not eat—when a quarrelsome industry insists on keeping the
      whole world up all night because it has a Stomach Ache, I feel
      suddenly that the people ought to be able to take the industry
      away and put it into such hands that the people in the streets
      will be protected; into hands that will make the industry be-
      have so that it won't have a stomach ache. An industry with
      a stomach ache always has it because somebody in it has been
      over-eating and getting more than their share, and is incom-
      petent and unfit; and obviously it should have its freedom, its
      privilege of selecting its food, taken away from it until it be-
      haves.

      Always allowing for exceptions, we may put it down as a [53]
      general truth that, when we find a cause using force or mere
      advantage of position, it is because there is incompetence or
      lack of brains in those who conduct it, and the cure lies, not in
      more force, but in more brains. One cannot help being angered
      by force, because one knows that it is not only not a remedy,
      but is itself the cause of all incompetence and blindness in busi-
      ness. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up,
      postpones co-operation, defeats the mutual interest which is the
      very substance of business efficiency in a nation. Force is itself
      the injury mounting up more and more, which it seeks to cure.

      The most likely way to prevent industrial trouble would
      seem to be to have employers and managers and foremen who
      have a genius for getting men to trust and believe in them. We
      are getting smoke-consumers, computing machines, and the
      next contrivance is going to be the employer who has the under-
      standing spirit, and who sees the cash value of human genius,
      the value in the market of genius for being fair and getting on
      with people. Arbitration boards are at best (as they them-
      selves would say) stupid and negative things, and though bet-
      ter than nothing, as a rule merely postpone evil or change
      symptoms. No one can ever really arbitrate for anyone else
      either in industry or marriage except for a moment. The
      trouble lies deep down inside the people who keep needing
      arbitration. As long as these people are still there, and as long
      as incompetent employers or employees are there, there is bound
      to be trouble.

      Turning out incompetent employers and incompetent la-
      bourers is the only way. We are getting rid of them as rapidly
      as possible. All business in the last resort turns on brains for
      being human and understanding people. Business, as people
      say, is partly business and business is partly economics, but
      more than anything else, in modern times, business is psy-
      chology.

      Success is the science of being believed in. Incompetent
      employers and incompetent labourers are already being turned [54]
      out, and are bound to be turned out implacably more and more,
      by the competitive nature of modern business. Under present
      conditions, if we have in each industry one single competent
      employing firm, with brains for being fair and brains for being
      far-sighted, and for being thoughtful of others—in short, with
      brains for being believed in—the control of that industry soon
      falls into their hands. People who use force instead of brains
      are second-rate, are out of the spirit of the times, and are going
      by. And this seems to be the spirit, too, which is to govern the
      more efficient Labour Unions as well as the more efficient Trusts.

      If it were possible to collect the names in England and Amer-
      ica of the men in each industry where brains were being per-
      sonally believed in, we would have a list of the leaders of
      England and America for the next fifty years. Having a soul in
      business pays, not because it affords a fine motive power, but
      because it affords a practical and conclusive method of driving
      the devil out of business. He is being driven out of industry,
      one industry at a time, by men who get on better without him;
      and this is going to go on until the ability to do this—to crowd
      out the devil, to get the devil out of machines and factories, out
      of the machinery of organization—the power to keep the devil
      out of things and out of people, is recognized by everybody as
      the greatest, most subtle, most victorious and universal market-
      value in the world. The men who can be believed in most will
      get the most business, and, what is still more important, the
      men who can make men believe in them most will be able to hire
      the employees who can be believed in most, and will get a
      monopoly of the efficiency of the world; and though the men
      who can be believed in less may be able to continue for a time
      to do their work and go through all their old motions as well as
      they can, with all their old lumbering, pathetic machinery of
      watching each other and suspecting each other and fighting
      each other humped up on their backs, they can never hope to
      compete with free-moving, honest men, who deal directly and
      openly and in a few words for their employees, jobbers, con- [55]
      sumers, and the public, without any vast machinery of sus-
      picion to bother with. It is a most curious, local, temporary,
      back-county idea, the idea that, for sheer industrial economy,
      for simple cheap conclusive finance, there is anything on earth
      in business that will take the place of old-fashioned human
      personal prestige—the prestige of the man who has a genius
      for being believed in.

      In away, perhaps the recent strike among the London cab-
      men is an instance of what is really the essential issue in every
      strike. The bottom fact about the taxi chauffeurs, stated
      simply, was that they did not believe in their employers. They
      believed that, if the precise figures were known, their employers
      were getting more than their share. On the other hand, the
      bottom fact about the employers was that they did not and
      could not believe that, if the precise figures were known, the
      cabmen were not getting more than their share. They insisted
      that the cabmen should publish, or make known, the precise
      figures of their extras. The cabmen declined to do it, and it
      made them look for the moment perhaps as if they were wrong.

      But were they necessarily wrong? Was it really true that
      they had any more reason to trust their employers than their
      employers had to trust them? The cabmen might quite hon-
      estly and justly have said to the owners: "What we want is
      an honest, impeccable little dividend-recorder fastened on the
      back of every owner, as well as on our machines and on us.
      Then we will publish our extras."

      The determining and important fact of economics in the last
      analysis always turns out to be some human fact, some fact
      about people. It is really true that just now, in the present
      half-stage of machine-industry, employers should nearly all
      be compelled to go about in this world with fare-recorders on
      their backs. Employees too. This would be the logical thing
      to do; and as it is impracticable, and as every business must have
      certain elements of secrecy in it in order to be competent, the
      only alternative is to have in charge men with enough genius [56]
      for being believed in and for taking measures to be believed in
      —to keep employees believing in them, in spite of secrecy.

      Under these conditions, it cannot be long before we will see in
      every business the men being put forward on both sides who
      have a genius for being believed in. Managers and superin-
      tendents will be put in office everywhere who see the cash
      value, the economy, of the simple, old-fashioned power in a
      man of a genius for being believed in; employers with the power
      of inspiring more and better work from their workmen; Labour
      men with the power of inspiring employers to believe in them,
      of inspiring their employers to put up money, stock, or profits
      on their belief—on the belief that workmen are capable of the
      highest qualities of manhood: hard work, loyalty, persistence,
      and faith toward a common end. I have preferred to have
      this inspired employer a millionaire, because the more capital
      he has the more men he can employ, and the more rapidly
      the other kind of millionaire, the blind, old-fashioned butter of
      Labour, will be driven out of business.

      Little can be done with one book, but at this special juncture,
      this psychological moment for copartnership and the spirit of
      copartnership, when all the world is touched to the quick by
      great strikes—at a time when one can sit still and almost hear
      the nations think—there are some of us who hope that the case
      we are trying to make out for copartnership between Capital
      and Labour will be of use to those who are trying to do things,
      and who for the moment find themselves foiled at every point
      by men who have given up believing in human nature. We
      wish to put ourselves on record, and to say that we do believe in
      human nature, and that we believe not only that the inspired
      employer is going to be evolved by the Crowd, but that the
      Crowd is going to recognize him and is going to take sides with
      him, and that the Crowd is going to justify him, make him suc-
      ceed, is going to make his success its own success. In other
      words, we believe in heroes, crowds, and goodness; in men of
      heroic gifts—who are fit and meet to interpret the wills and [57]
      desires of crowds—who are great men or Crowd-Men, crowds
      in spirit themselves.

      I would like to try to express the type of modern man who, as
      it seems to me, is about to prove himself the real ruler of our
      modern world, the silent master of what the crowds shall think.
      It has seemed to me that it is going to be a man of a marked
      type, and of a particular temperament, to whom we will have
      to look in our new and crowded world for the crowd-interpreter,
      or man who touches the imagination of crowds.

      As our whole labour problem to-day turns on our being able
      to touch the imagination of Crowds, it may not be uninteresting
      in the next chapter to consider what a man who can do this will
      probably be like and the spirit in which he will do it.