Part 59 (1/2)

The government will deal with each man according to the facts, the scientific facts, that he has proved about himself.

The government acts according to scientific facts in everything except men, in pure food, in cholera, and the next thing the government is going to do is to be equally efficient in dealing with scientific facts in men.

It is going to give some men inspected liberty. If these men say they can be more efficient, as a railroad sometimes is, by being a monopoly, by being a vast, self-visioned, self-controlled body the government will have enough character, expert courage and shrewdness about human nature to provide a way for them to try it.

When the other people come up and ask why they cannot have these special immunities and why they cannot be a monopoly, or nearly a monopoly, too, the government will tell them why.

Telling them why will be governing them.

When we once reckon with new kinds and new sizes of men, everything follows. The first man who organizes a true monopoly for public service and who does it better than any state could do it, because he thinks of it himself, glories in it and has a genius for it, will be given a peerage in England perhaps. But he would not really care. The thing itself would be a peerage enough and either in America or England he would rather be rewarded by being singled out by the government for special rights and distinctions in conducting his business. The best way a democracy can honour a man who has served it is not to give him a t.i.tle or to make a frivolous, idle monument of bronze for him, but to let him have his own way.

The way to honour any artist or any creative man, any man a country is in need of especially, is to let him have his own way.

We are told that the way to govern trusts is to untrammel compet.i.tion.

But the way to untrammel compet.i.tion is not to try to untrammel it in its details with lists of things men shall not do.

This is c.u.mbersome.

We would probably find it very much more convenient in specifying 979 detailed things trusts cannot do, if we could think of certain sum-totals of details.

Then we could deal with the details in a lump.

The best sum totals of details in this world that have ever been invented yet, are men.

We will pick out a man who has a definite, marked character, who is a fine, convenient sum-total that any one can see, of things not to do.

We will pick out another man in the same line of business who is a fine, convenient sum-total of things that people ought to do.

The government will find ways, as the Coach of Business as the Referee of the Game for the people, to stand by this man until he whips the other, drives him out of business or makes him play as good a game as he does.

When a child finds suddenly that his father is not merely keeping him from doing things, that his father has a soul, the father begins to get results out of the child.

As a rule a child discovers first that his father has a soul by noticing that he insists on treating him as if he had one.

Of course a corporation that has not a soul yet does not propose to be dictated to by a government that has not a soul yet. When corporations without souls see overwhelmingly that a government has a soul, they will be filled with a wholesome fear. They will always try at first to prevent it from having a soul if they can.

But the moment it gets one and shows it, they will be glad. They will feel on firm ground. They will know what they know. They will act.

In the hospital on the hill not far from my house, one often sees one attendant going out to walk with twelve insane men. One would think it would not be safe for twelve insane men to go out to walk with one sane man, with one man who has his soul on.

The reason it is safe, is, that the moment one insane man or man who has not his soul on, attacks the man who has a soul, all of the other eleven men throw themselves upon him and fling him to the ground. Men whose souls are not on, protect, every time, the man who has his soul on because the man who has a soul is the only defence they have from the men who have not.

It is going to be the same with governments. We believe in a government's having as much courage in America as a ten-dollar-a-week attendant in an insane asylum. We want a government that sees how courage works.

We are told in the New Testament that we are all members one of another.

If society has a soul and if every member of it has a soul, what is the relation of the social soul to the individual soul?