Part 50 (1/2)

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, and had then created some new 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 unexpected sum of money among all these three cla.s.ses 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 all over 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 extraordinary 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 extraordinary 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.”

If a man gives over to other people his deepest motives, 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 inst.i.tution and not a humdrum, mechanical-minded hold-up anybody could think of--in charge of a few uninteresting, inglorious men--men n.o.body really cares to know and that n.o.body 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-cla.s.s, socially feeble-minded men, of seeing columns 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 cla.s.s, 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 get it out of a Bible, or put it into a hymn book or make a religion of it, that all the first cla.s.s minds of the world--the men who see far enough to be unselfish, should give over their money to second-cla.s.s men, is the most monstrous, most unbelieving, unfaithful, unbiblical, irreligious thing a world can be guilty of. The one thing that is now the matter with money, is that the second-cla.s.s people have most of it.

”What would happen if we applied asceticism or a tired, discouraged 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.