Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
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that will make the industry behave 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 incompetent and unfit; and obviously it should have its freedom, its privilege of selecting its food, taken away from it until it behaves.
Always allowing for exceptions, we may put it down as a 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 business. Force merely heaps the incompetence and blindness up, postpones coöperation, 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 understanding 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 themselves would say) stupid and negative things, and though better than nothing, as a rule merely postpone evil or change symptoms. No one can ever really arbitrate for any one 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 labourers 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 psychology.
Success is the science of being believed in. Incompetent employers and incompetent labourers are already being turned 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 America of the men in each industry where brains were being personally 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, consumers, and the public, without any vast machinery of suspicion 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 a way, perhaps the recent strike among the London cabmen 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 honestly 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 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 superintendents 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 succeed, 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 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