BOOK ONE

      CROWDS AND MACHINES


      CHAPTER XII

      NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN

      IT WOULD be hard to overestimate the weariness and cyni-
      cism and despair that have been caused in the world by its
      more recklessly hopeful men—the men who plump down hap-
      pily anywhere and hope, the optimists who are merely slovenly
      in their minds about evil. But the optimism that consists in
      putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds and in
      giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the
      optimism that consists in having one's brain move :vigorously
      through disagreeable facts—organize them into the other
      facts with which they belong and with which they work—is
      worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried
      optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things.

      When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the
      feeling of being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little,
      of course, having all those other people about one stodgily
      standing up for people and not really seeing through them!

      So, though one ought not to, one does feel a little superior—
      even with the best intentions—when one is being discouraged.

      But the trouble with pessimism is that it is only at the
      moment when one is having it that one really enjoys it, or feels
      in this way about it.

      Perhaps I should not undertake to speak for others, and
      should only speak for myself; but I can only bear witness, for
      one, that every time in my life that I have broken through the
      surface a little, and seen through to the evil, and found myself
      suddenly and astutely discouraged, I have found afterward that
      all I had to do was to see the same thing a little farther over,
      set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in larger or more full [87]
      relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged.

      So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling
      discouraged about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed
      it, too, in watching other people—men I know. If I could
      take all the men I know who are living and acting as if they
      believed big things about people to-day, men who are daily
      taking for granted great things in human nature, and put them
      in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then take
      all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one
      another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people
      would find it .hard to tell which group would be more clever.
      Possibly the reason more of us do not spend more time in being
      hopeful about the world is that it takes more brains usually than
      we happen to have at the moment. Hope may be said to be
      an act of the brain in which it sees facts in relations large enough
      to see what they are for, an act in which it insists in a given case
      upon giving the facts room enough to turn around and to relate
      themselves to one another, and settle down where they belong
      in one's mind, the way they would in real time.

      So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having
      looked forward, I know the way I am going.

      I am going to hope.

      It is the only way to see through things. The only way to
      dare to see through ones' self; the only way to see through other
      people and to see past them, and to see with them and for them
      —is to hope.

      So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as
      I have put it to myself.

      There are four questions with which day by day we stand
      face to face:

      1. Does human nature change?

      2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision?

      3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and
      new sizes of men?

      4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical [88]
      and make a new world?

      Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this
      moment, on how he decides these questions. If he says Yes,
      he will live one kind of life, he will live up to his world. If he
      says No, he will have a mean world, smaller-minded than he is
      himself, and he will live down to it.

      This is what the common run of men about us—the men of
      less creative type in literature, in business, and in politics—
      are doing. They do not believe human nature is changing.
      They are living down to a world that is going by. They are
      living down to a world that is smaller than they are themselves.

      They are trying to make others do it. They answer the question
      "Does human nature change?" by "No!" Wilbur Wright,
      when he flew around over the heads of the people in New York
      a few years ago, a black speck above a whole city with its heads
      up, answered "Yes!"

      But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped
      short with a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air
      instead of the ground.

      The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright's
      flying was that he changed the minds of the whole human race
      in a few minutes about one thing. There was one particular
      thing that for forty thousand years they knew they could not do.
      And now they knew they could.

      It naturally follows—and it lies in the mind of every man
      who lives—that there must be other particular things. And
      as nine men out of ten are in business, most of these particular
      things are going to be done in business.

      The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching.

      It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world.

      One sees everywhere business men going about the street
      expecting new things of themselves. They expect things of
      the very ground, and of the air, and of one another they had
      not dared expect before.

      The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had [89]
      been the president of an Electric Light Company for twenty
      years, who had invented a public service corporation that
      worked. Since he took office and dictated the policy of the
      Company, every single overture for more expensive equipment
      in the electric lighting of the city has come from the Company,
      and every single overture for reducing the rate to consumers
      has come from the company.

      The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest per
      capita in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country;
      and, incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let
      them have electricity without metres, and the people so trust
      the Company that they save its electricity as they would their
      own.

      Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if
      he could. is brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains
      from leaving his lights burning all night when he goes to bed
      he is not merely saving the Company's electricity but his own.
      He knows that he is reducing his own and everybody's price
      for electricity, and not merely increasing the profits of the
      Company.

      It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men
      every day, every night, turning on and turning off their lights.

      The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an
      almost hourly, influence on the way men do business and go
      about their work in that city—the motives and assumptions
      with which they bargain with one another—that might be
      envied by twenty churches.

      All that had happened was that a man with a powerful,
      quietly wilful personality—the kind that went on crusades
      and took cities in other ages—had appeared at last, and
      proposed to do the same sort of thing in business. He proposed
      to express his soul, just as it was, in business the way other
      people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in poetry
      or more easy and conventional ways.

      If he could not have made the electric light business say the [90]
      things about people and about himself that he liked and that
      he believed, he would have had to make some other business
      say them.

      One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in
      business was the economic value of being human, the enormous
      business saving that could be effected by being believed in.

      He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he
      knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as
      people said, cc being believed in did not pay," it must be because
      ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had
      not been invented.

      He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light
      Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with
      the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific
      understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it,
      that he should be allowed his own way for three years—in
      believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed
      in as much as he liked.

      The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind,
      and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there
      was a great light in his face.

      He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and
      conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more
      than they could.

      By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of
      expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation—a
      Public Service Corporation—that had a soul, and conse-
      quently worked.