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?
A man"s soul is the faculty in him for seeing the Whole in relation to the part--his vision for others in relation to his vision for himself.
My forefinger"s soul in writing with this fountain pen is the sense my forefinger has of its relation to my arm, my spinal column, and my brain. The ability and efficiency of my forefinger depends upon its soul, that is, its sense of relation to the other members of the body.
If my forefinger tries to act like a brain all by itself, as it sometimes does, n.o.body reads my writing.
The government in a society is the soul of all the members and it treats them according to their souls.
The one compulsion a government will use if it has a soul, will be granting charters in business in such a way as to fix definite responsibility and definite publicity upon a few men.
If a corporation has a soul, it must show. It must have a face. Anybody can tell a face off-hand or while going by. Anybody can keep track of a corporation if it has a face.
The trouble with the average corporation is that all that anybody can see is its stomach. Even this is anonymous.
Whose Stomach is it? Who is responsible for it? If we hit it, whom will we hit? Let the government find out. If the time the government is now spending in making impossibly minute laws for impossibly minute men, were spent in finding out what size men were, and who they were and then giving them just as many rights from the people, as they are the right kind and the right size to handle for the people, it would be an American government.
If there is one thing rather than another that an American or an Englishman loves, it is a.s.serting himself or expressing his character in what he does. The typical dominating Englishman or American is not as successful as a Frenchman or as an Italian in expressing other things, as he is in expressing his character.
He cares more about expressing his character and a.s.serting it. If he is dealing with things, he makes them take the stamp of who he is. If he is dealing with people, he makes them see and acknowledge who he is. They must take in the facts about what he is like when they are with him.
They must deal with him as he is.
This trait may have its disadvantages, but if an Englishman or an American is on this earth for anything, this is what he is for--to express his character in what he does--in strong, vigorous, manly lines draw a portrait of himself and show what he is like in what he does.
This may be called on both sides of the sea to-day as we stand front to front with the more graceful nations, Anglo-Saxon Art.
It is because this particular art in the present crisis of human nature on this planet is the desperate, the almost reckless need of a world that the other nations of the world with all their dislike of us and their superiorities to us, with all our ugliness and heaviness and our galumphing in the arts, have been compelled in this huge, modern thicket of machines and crowds to give us the lead.
And now we are threading a way for nations through the moral wilderness of the earth.
This position has been accorded us because it goes with our temperament, because we can be depended upon to insist on a.s.serting ourselves and on expressing ourselves in what we do. If the present impromptu industrial machinery which has been handed over to us thoughtlessly and in a hurry, does not express us, everybody knows that we can be depended on to a.s.sert ourselves and that we will insist on one that will. The nations that are more polite and that can dance and bow more nicely than we can in a crisis like this would be dangerous. It is known about us throughout a world that we are not going to be cowed by wood or by iron or by steel and that we are not going to be cowed by men who are all wood and iron and steel inside. If wood, iron, or steel does not express us, we are Englishmen and we are Americans. We will b.u.t.t our character into it until it does.
If the American workman were to insist upon b.u.t.ting his American temperament into his labour union machinery, what would his labour machinery in America soon begin to show that an American labourer was like?
I imagine it might work out something like this:
The thoughtful workman looks about him. He discovers that the workman pays at least two times as much for coal as he needs to because miners down in Pennsylvania work one third as hard as they might for the money.
When he comes to think of it, all the labouring men of America are paying high prices because they have to pay all the other workmen in America for working as little as they can. He is working one third less than he can and making his own cla.s.s pay for it. He sees every workman about him paying high prices because every other workman in making things for him to eat and for him to wear, is cheating him--doing a third less a day for him than he ought.
At this point the capitalists pile in and help. They shove the prices up still higher because capital is not interested in an industry in which the workmen do six hours" work in nine. It demands extra profits. So while the workmen put up the prices by not working, the capitalists put up the prices because they are afraid the workmen will not work. Half work, high prices.
Then the American workman thinks. He begins to suppose.
Suppose that the millers" workmen and the workmen in the woollen mills in America see how prices of supplies for labouring men are going up and suppose they agree to work as hard as they can? Suppose the wool workers of the world want cheap bread. The flour mill workers want cheap clothes. We will say to the bread people, "We will bring down the price of wool for you if you will bring down the price of bread for us."
Then let Meat and Potatoes do the same for one another. Then two industries at a time, industries getting brains in pairs, until like the animals going into the ark, little by little (or rather very fast, almost piling in, in fact, after the first pair have tried it), at last our true, spirited, practical minded American workmen will have made their labour machines as natural and as human and as American as they are. They will stop trying to lower prices by not working, each workman joining (in a factory) the leisure cla.s.ses and making the other workmen pay for it.