BOOK ONE

      CROWDS AND MACHINES


      CHAPTER IX

      THE CROWD'S IMAGINATION ABOUT PEOPLE

      I WOULD like to propose, as a basis for the judgment of
      men and events, and as a basis for forecasting the next men and
      next events, and arriving at a vision of action, a Theory of
      the World.

      Every man has one.

      Every man one knows can be seen doing his work in this
      world on a great background, a kind of panorama or stage
      setting in his mind, made up of history and books, newspapers,
      people, and experiences, which might be called his Theory of
      the World.

      It is his theory of the world which makes him what he is—
      his personal judgment or personal interpretation of what the
      world is like, and what works in it, and what does not work.

      A man's theory as to why people do or do not do wrong is not
      a theory he might in some brief disinterested moment, possibly
      at luncheon, take time to discuss. His theory of what is wrong
      and of what is right, and of how they work, touches the efficiency
      with which he works intimately and permanently at every point
      every minute of his business day.

      If he does not know, in the middle of his business day, what
      his theory of the world—of human nature—is, let him stop
      and find out.

      A man's theory of the world is the skylight or manhole over
      his work. It becomes his hell or heaven—his day and night.

      He breathes his theory of the world and breathes his idea of the
      people in it; and everything he does may be made or may be
      marred by what, for instance, he thinks in the long-run about
      what I am saying now on this next page. Whether he is writing [75]
      for people, or doing business with them over a counter, or
      launching books at them, everything he does will be steeped in
      what he believes about what I am saying now—it shall be the
      colour of the world to him, the sound or timbre of his voice
      —what he thinks or can make up his mind to think, of what
      I am saying—on this next page.
 


      CHAPTER X

      A DEMOCRATIC THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE

      IF THE men who were crucifying Jesus could have been
      suddenly stopped at the last moment, and if they could have
      been kept perfectly still for ten minutes and could have thought
      about it, some of them would have refused to go on with the
      crucifixion when the ten minutes were over. If they could have
      been stopped for twenty minutes, there would have been still
      more of them who would have refused to have gone on with it.

      They would have stolen away and wondered about The Man
      in their hearts. There were others who were there who would
      have needed twenty days of being still and of thinking. There
      were some who would have had to have twenty years to see
      what they really wanted, in all the circumstances, to do.

      People crucified Christ because they were in a hurry.

      They did what they wanted to do at the moment. So far
      as we know, there were only two men who did what they would
      have wished they had done in twenty years: there was the thief
      on the other cross, who showed The Man he knew who He was;
      and there was the disciple John, who kept as close as he could.

      John perhaps was thinking of the past—of all the things that
      Christ had said to him; and the man on the other cross was
      thinking what was going to happen next. The other people
      who had to do with the crucifixion were all thinking about the
      thing they were doing at the moment and the way they felt
      about it. But the Man was Thinking, not of His suffering, but
      of the men in front of Him, and of what they could be thinking
      about, and what they would be thinking about afterward—
      in ten minutes, in twenty minutes, in twenty days, or in twenty
      years; and suddenly His heart was flooded with pity at what [77]
      they would be thinking about afterward, and in the midst of
      the pain in His arms and the pain in His feet He made that
      great cry to Heaven: "Father, forgive them; they know not
      what they do!"

      It is because Christians have never quite believed that The
      Man really meant this when He said it that they have persecuted
      the Jews for two thousand years. It is because they do not
      believe it now that they blame Mr. Rockefeller for doing what
      most of them twenty years ago would have done themselves.
      It was one of the hardest things to do and say that anyone ever
      said in the world, and it was said at the hardest possible time
      to say it. It was strange that one almost swooning with pain
      should have said the gentlest-hearted and truest thing
      about human nature that has ever been said since the
      world began. It has seemed to me the most literal, and
      perhaps the most practical, truth that has been said since the
      world began.

      It goes straight to the point about people. It gives one one's
      definition of goodness both for one's self and for others. It gives
      one a program for action.

      Except in our more joyous and free moments, we assume that
      when people do us a wrong, they know what they are about.
      They look at the right thing to do and they look at the wrong
      one, and they choose the wrong one because they like it better.
      Nine people out of ten one meets in the streets coming out of
      church on Sunday morning, if one asked them the question
      plainly, "Do you ever do wrong when you know it is wrong?"
      would say that they did. If you ask them what a sin is, they
      will tell you that it is something you do when you know you
      ought not to do it.

      But The Man Himself, in speaking of the most colossal sin
      that has ever been committed, seemed to think that when men
      committed a sin, it was because they did not really see what it
      was that they were doing. They did what they wanted to do
      at the moment. They did not do what they would have wished [78]
      they had done in twenty years.

      I would define goodness as doing what one would wish one had
      done in twenty years—twenty years, twenty days, twenty
      minutes, or twenty seconds, according to the time the action
      takes to get ripe.

      It would be far more true and more to the point instead of
      scolding or admiring Mr. Rockefeller's skilled labour at getting
      too rich, to point out mildly that he has done something that
      in the long-run he would not have wanted to do; that he has
      lacked the social imagination for a great permanently successful
      business. His sin has consisted in his not taking pains to act
      accurately and permanently, in his not concentrating his mind
      and finding out what he really wanted to do. It would seem
      to be better and truer and more accurate in the tremendous
      crisis of our modern life to judge Mr. Rockefeller, not as
      monster of wickedness, but merely as an inefficient, morally
      underwitted man. There are things that he has not thought
      of that every one else has.

      We see that in all those qualities that really go to make a
      great business house in a great nation John D. Rockefeller
      stands as the most colossal failure as yet that our American
      business life has produced. To point his incompetence out
      quietly and calmly and without scolding would seem to be the
      only fair way to deal with Mr. Rockefeller. He merely has
      not done what he would have wished he had done in twenty,
      well, possibly two hundred years, or as long a time as it would
      be necessary to allow for Mr. Rockefeller to see. The one
      thing that the world could accept gracefully from Mr. Rocke-
      feller now would be the establishment of a great endowment
      of research and education to help other people to see in time
      how they can keep from being like him. If Mr. Rockefeller
      leads in this great work and sees it soon enough, perhaps he
      will stop suddenly being the world's most lonely man.

      Many men have been lonely before in the presence of a few
      fellow human beings; but to be lonely with a whole nation—[79]
      eighty million people; to feel a whole human race standing there
      outside of your life and softly wondering about you, staring at
      you in the showcase of your money, peering in as out of a thou-
      sand newspapers upon you as a kind of moral curiosity under
      glass, studying you as the man who has performed the most
      athletic feat of not seeing what he was really doing and how he
      really looked in all the world—this has been Mr. Rockefeller's
      experience. He has not done what he would wish he had done
      in twenty years.

      Goodness may be defined as getting one's own attention, as
      boning down to find the best and most efficient way of finding
      out what one wants to do. Any man who will make adequate
      arrangements with himself at suitable times for getting his own
      attention will be good. Anyone else from outside who can
      make such arrangements for him, such arrangements of expres-
      sion or—of advertising goodness as to get his attention, will
      make him good.
 


      CHAPTER XI

      DOING AS ONE WOULD WISH ONE HAD DONE
      IN TWENTY YEARS

      IF TWO great shops could stand side by side on the Main
      Street of the World, and all the vices could be put in the show
      window of one of them and all the virtues in the show windows
      the other, and all the people could go by all day, all night, and
      see the windowful of virtues as they were, and the windowful
      of vices as they were, all the world would be good in the
      morning.

      It would stay good as long as people remembered how the
      windows looked. Or if they could not remember, all they would
      need to do, most people, when a vice tempted them would be
      to step out, look at it in its window a minute—possibly take
      a look too at the other window—and they would be good.

      If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and
      would take a step up to The Window, and take one firm look
      at it in The Window—see it lying there, its twenty years' evil
      its twenty days', its twenty minutes' evil, all branching up out
      of it—he would be good.

      When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other
      and really see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do
      right automatically. Wild horses cannot drag a man away
      from doing right if he sees what the right is.

      A little while ago in a New England city where the grade
      crossings had just been abolished, and where the railroad wound
      its way on a huge yellow sandbank through the most beautiful
      part of the town, a prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a
      letter to the President of the Company suggesting that the
      railroad (for a comparatively small sum, which he mentioned) [81]
      plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A letter came the
      next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do it. He
      might quite justifiably have been indignant and Hung himself
      into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would
      have been the regular and conventional thing to do under the
      circumstances. But it occurred to him instead, being a man of
      a curious and practical mind, that possibly he did not know how
      to express himself to railroad presidents, and that his letter had
      not said what he meant. He thought he would try again, and
      see what would happen if he expressed himself more fully and
      adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven feet
      long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture
      by a landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look
      when planted with trees and with shrubs, and the other a photo-
      graph—a long panorama of the same embankment as it then
      stood with its two great broadsides of yellowness trailing through
      the city. The box containing the rolls was sent without com-
      ment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the bottom
      of the pictures.

      A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for
      his suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made
      into a park at once.

      If God had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues,
      and had furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if
      all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to
      take out just the right slide or possibly try three or four up
      there on his canvas a second, no one would ever have any trouble
      in doing right.

      . . . . . . .

      It is not too much to say that this way of looking at evil and
      good—at the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a
      man once believes it, and if a man once practises it as a part
      of his daily practical interpretation and mastery of men, will
      soon put a new face for him on nearly every great human [82]
      problem with which he finds his time confronted. We shall
      watch the men in the world about us—each for their little day—
      trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral experiments,
      and we shall see the men—all of the men and all of the good
      and the evil in the men this moment—daily before our eyes
      working out with an implacable hopefulness the fate of the
      world. We know that, in spite of self-deceived syndicalism and
      self-deceived trusts, in spite of coal strikes and all the vain,
      comic little troops of warships around the earth, peace and
      righteousness in a vast overtone are singing toward us.

      We are not only going to have new and better motives in our
      modern men, but the new and better motives are going to be
      thrust upon us. Every man who reads these pages is having,
      at the present moment, motives in his life which he would not
      have been capable of at first. Why should not a human race
      have motives which it was not capable of at first? If one takes
      up two or three motives of one's own—the small motives and
      the large ones—and holds them up in one's hand and looks at
      them quietly from the point of view of what one would wish one
      had done in twenty years, there is scarcely one of us who would
      choose the small ones. People who are really modern, that is,
      who look beyond themselves in what they do to others, who live
      their lives as one might say six people away, or sixty people
      farther out from themselves, or sixty million people farther, are
      becoming more common everywhere; and people who look
      beyond the moment in what they do to another day, who are
      getting more and more to live their lives twenty years ahead,
      and to have motives that will last twenty years, are driven to
      better and more permanent motives.

      Thinking of more people when we act for ourselves means
      ethical consciousness or goodness, and better and more per-
      manent motives.

      In the last analysis, the men who permanently succeed in
      business will have to see farther than the other people do.

      Men like John D. Rockefeller, who have made failures of [83]
      their lives, and have not been able to conduct a business so as
      to keep it out of the courts, have failed because they have had
      imagination about Things but not imagination about people.

      The man who is just at hand will not do over again what
      Mr. Rockefeller has done. He will at least have made some
      advance in imagination over Rockefeller.

      Mr. Rockefeller became rich by cooperating with other rich
      men to exploit the public. The man of the immediate future
      is going to get rich, as rich as he cares to be, by cooperating
      not merely with his competitors—which is as far as Rockefeller
      got—but by cooperating with the people.

      It is a mere matter of social imagination, of seeing what
      succeeds most permanently, and honourably, of putting what
      has been called "goodness" and what is going to be called
      "Business" together. In other words, social imagination is
      going go make a man gravitate toward mutual interest or co-
      operation, which is the new and inevitable level of efficiency
      and success in business. Success is being transferred from
      men of millionaire genius to men of social and human genius.

      The men who are going to compete most successfully in mod-
      ern competitive business are competing by knowing how to
      cooperate better than their competitors do. Employers, em-
      ployees, consumers, partners, become irresistible by coopera-
      tion; only employers, employees, consumers, and partners
      who cooperate better than they do can hope to compete with
      them. The Trusts have already crowded out many small
      rivals because, while their cooperation has been one-sided,
      they have cooperated with more people than their rivals could;
      and the good Trusts, in the same way are going to crowd out the
      bad Trusts, because the good ones will know how to cooperate
      with more people than the bad ones do. They will have the
      human genius to see how they can cooperate with the people
      instead of against them.

      They are going to invent ways of winning and keeping the
      confidence of the people, of taking to this end a smaller and more [84]
      just share of profits. And they are going to gain their leader-
      ship through the wisdom and power that goes with their money,
      and not through the money itself. It is the spiritual power of
      their money that is going to count; and wealth, instead of being
      a millionaire disease, is going to become a great social energy
      in democracy. We are going to let men be rich because they
      represent us, not because they hold us up, and because the
      hold-up has gone by, that is: getting all one can, and service-
      getting what we have earned—has come in.

      The new kind and new size of politician will win his power
      by his faith, like U. Ren of Oregon; the new kind and new size
      of editor is going to hire with brains a millionaire to help him
      run his paper; and the new kind and new size of author, instead
      of tagging a publisher, will be paid royalties for supplying him
      with new ideas and creating for him new publics. Power in
      modern life is to be light and heat and motion, and not a gift
      of being heavy and solid. Even Money shall lose its inertia.

      We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and
      new sizes of men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some
      of them will be poor, and no one will care. We will simply look
      at the man and at what size he is.

      If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will.
      Sometimes one suspects that the reason goodness is not more
      popular in modern life is that it has been taken hold of the
      wrong way. Perhaps when we stop teasing people, and take
      goodness seriously and calmly, and see that goodness is essen-
      tially imagination, that it is brains, that it is thinking down
      through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to be
      more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains
      or imagination at all, it will be popular.

      Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I
      have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and
      the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its
      present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth,
      are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength
      of manhood. But I can only hope that these objections that
      people make will turn out like mine. I have been making
      objections all my life, as all idealists must—only to watch with
      dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections
      have of going by.

      People began by saying they would never use automobiles
      because they were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto!
      The automobile becomes silent and shapes itself in lines of
      beauty.

      Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the
      balloon succeeds," we said, "there will be no way of going just
      where and when you want to." And then, presto! regular
      channels of wind are discovered, and the balloon goes on.

      "Aeroplanes," we said, "may be successful, but the more
      successful they are, the more dangerous, and the more danger
      there will be of collisions—collisions in the dark and up in
      great sky at night." And, presto! man invents the wireless
      telegraph, and the entire sky can be full of whispers telling
      every airship where all the other airships are.

      Some of us have decided that we will never have anything
      to do with monopoly. Presto! there is suddenly evolved an
      entirely new type of monopolist—the man who can be rich
      and good; the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that
      serves the owners, the producers and employees, the distributors
      and the consumers alike. An American railway President has
      been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat
      in 2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. Some
      one, almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly con-
      entrated as dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York
      —who knows?—shall be carried around in one railway
      President's vest pocket.