Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
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can't," and "We can't." If people want to say "I can't," and "You can't," they will have to say it farther and farther away from this planet now. Let them try Mars. The modern imagination takes to impossibilities naturally with Wilbur Wright against the horizon. The thing we next cannot believe is the next thing to expect.
Nobody would have believed ten years ago that an architect could be invented who would tell a man that his house would cost him thirty thousand dollars, and then hand him back two thousand dollars when he had finished it. But the man had been invented—he invented himself.
He represents the owner, and does as the owner would be done by if he did it himself—if he had the technical knowledge and the time to do it.
Nobody would have believed a few years ago that a railway president, when he had occasion to reduce the wages of several thousand employees 10 per cent., would begin by reducing his own salary 30 per cent., and the salary of all the officials all the way down 15 per cent., or 20 per cent.
Nobody would have believed some time ago that an organizing inventor would be evolved who would meet his directors and tell them that, if they would have their work done in their mills in three shifts instead of two, the men would work so much better that it would not cost the Company more than 10 per cent. more to offer the better conditions. But such an organizing inventor has been invented, and has proved his case.
Luther Burbank has made a chestnut tree eighteen months old bear chestnuts; and it has always taken from ten to twenty-five years to make a tree furnish its first chestnut before. About the same time that Luther Burbank had succeeded in doing this with chestnuts a similar type of man, who was not particularly interested in chestnuts and wanted to do something with human nature, who believed that human nature could really be made to work, found a certain staple article that everybody needs every day in a state of anarchy in the market. The producers were not making anything on it. The wholesalers dealt in it without a profit, and the retailers sold it without a profit, and merely because the other things they sold were worthless without it.
——, who was the leading wholesale dealer and in the best position to act, pointed out that, if the business was organized and everybody in it would combine with everybody else and make it a monopoly, the price could be made lower, and everybody would make money.
Of course this was a platitude.
It was also a platitude that human nature was not good enough, and could not be trusted to work properly in a monopoly.
—— then proceeded to invent a monopoly—a kind of monopoly in which human nature could be trusted.
He used a very simple device.
He began by being trusted himself.
Having personally and directly proved that human nature in a monopoly could be trusted by being trusted himself, all he had to do was to capitalize his knowledge of human nature, use the enormous market value of the trust people had in him to gather people about him in the business who had a good practical business genius for being trusted too and for keeping trusted: everybody else was shut out.
The letter with which the monopoly was started (after dealing duly with the technical details of the business) ended like this:
" … the soundest lines of business—viz., fair prices, fair profits, fair division of profits, fair recognition of service, do as you would be done by, money back where it is practicable, one's profit so small as to make competition not worth while, open dealing, and open books."
He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and which the people trusted. He was a Luther Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts. He raised the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way for human nature to work.
CHAPTER VI
THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic forms:
1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible—the spiritual—as especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.
2. Imagination about the future—a new and extraordinary sense of what is going to happen next in the world.
3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.
Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree the mastery of the spirit over matter.
Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years an organic part of every man's life to-day.
The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.
CHAPTER VII
IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN
The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. The more power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.
Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—the big, final, and important thing—and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power.
Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea. Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense, the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers in, out of space, out of hope, out of faith, the lives of men. The mere fastened-down stable things, the mere actual facts, stopped being the world with Columbus, and the air and the sky began to be swung in, and to be swept through the thoughts and acts of men and of women. … Then miners, mariners, explorers, inventors—the impossible steamship, the railway, the impossible cotton-gin and sewing-machine and reaper, Hoosac tunnels and Atlantic cables. The impossible became one