CHAPTER XXI
THE LEAGUE OF THE MEN WHO ARE NOT AFRAID
If all the unbrained money in the world to-day and the men that go with it could be isolated, could be taken by men of imagination and put in a few ships and sent off to an island in the sea--if New York and London and all the other important places could be left in the hands of the men who have imagination, poor and rich, they would soon have the world in shape to make the men with merely owning minds, the mere owners off on their island, beg to come back to it, to be allowed to have a share in it on any terms.
In order to be fair, of course, their island would have to be a furnished island--mines, woods, and everything they could want. It would become a kind of brute wilderness or desert in twenty-five years. We could, now and then, some of us, take happy little trips, go out and look them over on their little furnished island. It would do us good to watch them--these men with merely owning or holding-on minds, really noticing at last how unimportant they are.
But it is not necessary to resort to a furnished island as a device, as a mirror for making mere millionaires see themselves.
This is a thing that could be done for millionaires now, most of them, here just where they are.
All that is necessary is to have the brains of the world so organized that the millionaires who expect merely because they are millionaires to be run after by brains, cannot get any brains to run after them.
I am in favour of organizing the brains of the world into a trades union.
One of the next things that is going to happen is that the managing and creating minds of the world to-day are going to organize, are going to see suddenly their real power and use it. The brains are about to have, as labour and capital already have, a cla.s.s consciousness.
I would not claim that there is going to be an international strike of the brains of the world, but it will not be long before the managing cla.s.s as a cla.s.s will be organized so that they can strike if they want to.
The Artists or Organizers and Managers of business will not need probably, in order to accomplish their purpose, to strike against the uncreative millionaires. They will make a stand (which the best of them have already made now) for the balance of power in any business that they furnish their brains to. The brains that create the profits for the owners and that create the labour for the labourers, will make terms for their brains and will withhold their brains if necessary to this end.
But it is far more likely that they will accomplish their purpose sooner by using their brains for the millionaires and for the labourers--by cooperating with the millionaires and labourers than they will by striking against them or keeping their brains back.
They are in a position to make the millionaires see how little money they can make without them even in a few days. They will let them try. A very little trying will prove it.
Where hand labour would have to strike for weeks and months to prove its value, brain labour would have to strike hours and days.
This is what is going to be done in modern business in one business at a time, the brains insisting in each firm upon full control.
Then, of course, the firms that have the brains in most full control will drive the firms in which brains are in less control out of compet.i.tion.
Then brains will spread from one business to another. The Managers, Artists, and Organizers of the world will have formed at last a Brain Syndicate, and they will put themselves in a position to determine in their own interests and in the interests of society at large the terms on which all men--all men who have no brains to put with their money--shall be allowed to have the use of theirs. They will monopolize the brain supply of the world.
Then they will act. Under our present regime money hires men; under the regime of the Brain Syndicate men will hire money. Money--_i.e._, saved up or canned labour, is going to be hired by Managers, Organizers, and Engineers with as much discrimination and with as deep a study of its efficiency, as new labour is hired. The millionaires are going to be seen standing with their money bags and their little hats in their hands like office boys asking for positions for their money before the doors of the really serious and important men, the men who toil out the ideas and the ways and the means of carrying out ideas--the men who do the real work of the world, who see things that they want and see how to get them--the men of imagination, the inventors of ideas, organizers of facts, generals and engineers in human nature.
It is these men who are going to allow people who merely have thoughtless labour and people who merely have thoughtless money to be let in with them. The world"s quarrel with the rich man is not his being a rich man, but his being rich without brains, and its quarrel with the poor labourer is not his being a poor labourer, but his being a poor labourer without brains. The only way that either of these men can have a chance to be of any value is in letting themselves be used by the man who will supply them with what they lack. They will try to get this man to see if he cannot think of some way of getting some good out of them for themselves, and for others.
We have a Frederick Taylor for furnishing brains to labour.
We are going to have a Frederick Taylor to attend to the brain-supply of millionaires, to idea-outfits for directors.
Every big firm is going to have a large group of specialists working on the problem of how to make millionaires--its own particular millionaires think, devising ways of keeping idle and thoughtless capitalists out of the way. If the experts fail in making millionaires think, they may be succeeded by experts in getting rid of them and in finding thoughtful money, possibly made up of many small sums, to take their place.
The real question the Artist or Organizer is going to ask about any man with capital will be, "Is it the man who is making the money valuable and important or is it the money that is making this man important for the time being and a little noticeable or important-looking?"
The only really serious question we have to face about money to-day is the unimportance of the men who have it. The Hewers or Scoopers, or Grabbers, who have a.s.sumed the places of the Artist and the Inventor because they have the money, are about to be crowded over to the silent, modest back seats in directors" meetings. If they want their profits, they must give up their votes. They are going to be snubbed. They are going to beg to be noticed. The preferred stock or voting stock will be kept entirely in the hands of the men of working imagination, of clear-headedness about things that are not quite seen, the things that const.i.tute the true values in any business situation, the men who have the sense of the way things work and of the way they will have to go.
Mere millionaires who do not know their place in a great business will be crowded into small ones. They will be confronted by the organized refusal of men with brains to work for their inferiors, to be under control of men of second-rate order. Men with mere owning and grabbing minds will only be able to find men as stupid as they are to invest and manage their money for them. In a really big creative business their only chance will be cash and silence. They will be very glad at last to get in on any terms, if the men of brains will let their money edge into their business without votes and be carried along with it as a favour.
It is because things are not like this now, that we have an industrial problem.
Managers who have already hired labour as a matter of course are going to hire the kind of capital they like, the kind of capital that thinks and that can work with thinking men.
There will gradually evolve a general recognition in business on the part of men who run it and on the part of managers, of the moral or human value of money. The successful manager is no longer going to grab thoughtlessly at any old, idle, foolish pot of money that may be offered to him. He is going to study the man who goes with it, see how he will vote and see whether he knows his place, whether he is a Hewer, for instance, who thinks he is an Inventor. Does he or does he not know which he is, an Inventor, an Artist, or a Hewer?
Capitalists will expect as a matter of course to be looked over and to be hired in a great business enterprise as carefully as labourers are being hired now.
The moment it is generally realized that the managers of every big modern business have become as particular about letting in the right kind of directors as they have been before about letting in the right kind of labour, we will stop having an upside-down business world.
An upside-down business world is one in which any man who has money thinks he can be a director almost anywhere, a world in which on every hand we find managers who are not touching the imagination of the public and getting it to buy, and not touching the imagination of labour and getting it to work, because they are not free to carry out their ideas without submitting them to incompetent and scared owners.
The incompetent and scared owners--the men who cannot think--are about to be shut out. Then they will be compelled to hire incompetent and scared managers. Then they will lose their money. Then the world will slip out of their hands.
The problem of modern industry is to be not the distribution of the money supply, but the distribution of the man-supply.
Money follows men.
Free men. Free money.
BOOK FIVE
GOOD NEWS AND HARD WORK
TO ANYBODY
"_I know that all men ever born are also my brothers....
Limitless leaves too, stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heaped stones, elders, mulleins and poke weed._"
_A Child said, "What is gra.s.s?" fetching it to me with full hands.
How could I answer the Child?_
_"I want to trust the sky and the gra.s.s!
I want to believe the songs I hear from the fenceposts!
Why should a maple-bud mislead me?"_
PART ONE