If two great shops could stand side by side on the Main Street of the World, and all the vices could be put in the show window of one of them and all the virtues in the show windows the other, and all the people could go by all day, all night, and see the windowful of virtues as they were, and the windowful of vices as they were, all the world would be good in the morning.
It would stay good as long as people remembered how the windows looked.
Or if they could not remember, all they would need to do, most people, when a vice tempted them would be to step out, look at it in its window a minute--possibly take a look too at the other window--and they would be good.
If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice, and would take a step up to The Window, and take one firm look at it in The Window--see it lying there, its twenty years" evil, its twenty days", its twenty minutes" evil, all branching up out of it--he would be good.
When we see the wrong on one side and the right on the other and really see the right as vividly as we do the wrong, we do right automatically.
Wild horses cannot drag a man away from doing right if he sees what the right is.
A little while ago in a New England city where the grade crossings had just been abolished, and where the railroad wound its way on a huge yellow sandbank through the most beautiful part of the town, a prominent, public-spirited citizen wrote a letter to the President of the Company suggesting that the railroad (for a comparatively small sum, which he mentioned) plant its sandbanks with trees and shrubs. A letter came the next day saying that the railroad was unwilling to do it. He might quite justifiably have been indignant and flung himself into print and made a little scene in the papers, which would have been the regular and conventional thing to do under the circ.u.mstances. But it occurred to him instead, being a man of a curious and practical mind, that possibly he did not know how to express himself to railroad presidents, and that his letter had not said what he meant. He thought he would try again, and see what would happen if he expressed himself more fully and adequately. He took for it this second time a box seven feet long. The box contained two long rolls of paper, one a picture by a landscape gardener of the embankment as it would look when planted with trees and with shrubs, and the other a photograph--a long panorama of the same embankment as it then stood with its two great broadsides of yellowness trailing through the city. The box containing the rolls was sent without comment and with photographs and estimates of cost on the bottom of the pictures.
A letter from the railroad came next day thanking him for his suggestion, and promising to have the embankment made into a park at once.
If G.o.d had arranged from the beginning, slides of the virtues, and had furnished every man with a stereopticon inside, and if all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to take out just the right slide or possibly try three or four up there on his canvas a second, no one would ever have any trouble in doing right.
It is not too much to say that this way of looking at evil and good--at the latent capacities of evil and good in men, if a man once believes it, and if a man once practises it as a part of his daily practical interpretation and mastery of men, will soon put a new face for him on nearly every great human problem with which he finds his time confronted. We shall watch the men in the world about us--each for their little day--trying their funny, pathetic, curious little moral experiments, and we shall see the men--all of the men and all of the good and the evil in the men this moment--daily before our eyes working out with an implacable hopefulness the fate of the world. We know that, in spite of self-deceived syndicalism and self-deceived trusts, in spite of coal strikes and all the vain, comic little troops of warships around the earth, peace and righteousness in a vast overtone are singing toward us.
We are not only going to have new and better motives in our modern men, but the new and better motives are going to be thrust upon us. Every man who reads these pages is having, at the present moment, motives in his life which he would not have been capable of at first. Why should not a human race have motives which it was not capable of at first? If one takes up two or three motives of one"s own--the small motives and the large ones--and holds them up in one"s hand and looks at them quietly from the point of view of what one would wish one had done in twenty years, there is scarcely one of us who would choose the small ones.
People who are really modern, that is, who look beyond themselves in what they do to others, who live their lives as one might say six people away, or sixty people farther out from themselves, or sixty million people farther, are becoming more common everywhere; and people who look beyond the moment in what they do to another day, who are getting more and more to live their lives twenty years ahead, and to have motives that will last twenty years, are driven to better and more permanent motives.
Thinking of more people when we act for ourselves means ethical consciousness or goodness, and better and more permanent motives.
In the last a.n.a.lysis, the men who permanently succeed in business will have to see farther than the other people do.
Men like John D. Rockefeller, who have made failures of their lives, and have not been able to conduct a business so as to keep it out of the courts, have failed because they have had imagination about Things but not imagination about people.
The man who is just at hand will not do over again what Mr. Rockefeller has done. He will at least have made some advance in imagination over Rockefeller.
Mr. Rockefeller became rich by cooperating with other rich men to exploit the public. The man of the immediate future is going to get rich, as rich as he cares to be, by cooperating not merely with his compet.i.tors--which is as far as Rockefeller got--but by cooperating with the people.
It is a mere matter of social imagination, of seeing what succeeds most permanently, and honourably, of putting what has been called "goodness"
and what is going to be called "Business" together. In other words, social imagination is going to make a man gravitate toward mutual interest or cooperation, which is the new and inevitable level of efficiency and success in business. Success is being transferred from men of millionaire genius to men of social and human genius. The men who are going to compete most successfully in modern compet.i.tive business are competing by knowing how to cooperate better than their compet.i.tors do. Employers, employees, consumers, partners, become irresistible by cooperation; only employers, employees, consumers, and partners who cooperate better than they do can hope to compete with them. The Trusts have already crowded out many small rivals because, while their cooperation has been one-sided, they have cooperated with more people than their rivals could; and the good Trusts, in the same way are going to crowd out the bad Trusts, because the good ones will know how to cooperate with more people than the bad ones do. They will have the human genius to see how they can cooperate with the people instead of against them.
They are going to invent ways of winning and keeping the confidence of the people, of taking to this end a smaller and more just share of profits. And they are going to gain their leadership through the wisdom and power that goes with their money, and not through the money itself.
It is the spiritual power of their money that is going to count; and wealth, instead of being a millionaire disease, is going to become a great social energy in democracy. We are going to let men be rich because they represent us, not because they hold us up, and because the hold-up has gone by, that is: getting all one can, and service--getting what we have earned--has come in.
The new kind and new size of politician will win his power by his faith, like U. Ren of Oregon; the new kind and new size of editor is going to hire with brains a millionaire to help him run his paper; and the new kind and new size of author, instead of tagging a publisher, will be paid royalties for supplying him with new ideas and creating for him new publics. Power in modern life is to be light and heat and motion, and not a gift of being heavy and solid. Even Money shall lose its inertia.
We are in this way being driven into having new kinds and new sizes of men; and some of them will be rich ones, and some of them will be poor, and no one will care. We will simply look at the man and at what size he is.
If our preachers are not saving us, our business men will. Sometimes one suspects that the reason goodness is not more popular in modern life is that it has been taken hold of the wrong way. Perhaps when we stop teasing people, and take goodness seriously and calmly, and see that goodness is essentially imagination, that it is brains, that it is thinking down through to what one really wants, goodness will begin to be more coveted. Except among people with almost no brains or imagination at all, it will be popular.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood. But I can only hope that these objections that people make will turn out like mine. I have been making objections all my life, as all idealists must--only to watch with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of going by.
People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly. Presto! The automobile becomes silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty.
Some of us had decided against balloons. "Even if the balloon succeeds,"
we said, "there will be no way of going just where and when you want to." And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the balloon goes on.
"Aeroplanes," we said, "may be successful, but the more successful they are, the more dangerous, and the more danger there will be of collisions--collisions in the dark and up in the great sky at night." And, presto! man invents the wireless telegraph, and the entire sky can be full of whispers telling every airship where all the other airships are.
Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to do with monopoly. Presto! there is suddenly evolved an entirely new type of monopolist--the man who can be rich and good; the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that serves the owners, the producers and employees, the distributors and the consumers alike. An American railway President has been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat in 2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. Some one, almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York--who knows?--shall be carried around in one railway President"s vest pocket.
CHAPTER XII
NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN
It would be hard to overestimate the weariness and cynicism and despair that have been caused in the world by its more recklessly hopeful men--the men who plump down happily anywhere and hope, the optimists who are merely slovenly in their minds about evil. But the optimism that consists in putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds and in giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the optimism that consists in having one"s brain move vigorously through disagreeable facts--organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work--is worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things.
When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little, of course, having all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not really seeing through them!
So, though one ought not to, one does feel a little superior--even with the best intentions--when one is being discouraged.
But the trouble with pessimism is that it is only at the moment when one is having it that one really enjoys it, or feels in this way about it.
Perhaps I should not undertake to speak for others, and should only speak for myself; but I can only bear witness, for one, that every time in my life that I have broken through the surface a little, and seen through to the evil, and found myself suddenly and astutely discouraged, I have found afterward that all I had to do was to see the same thing a little farther over, set it in the light beyond it, and look at it in larger or more full relations, and I was no longer astutely discouraged.
So I have come to believe slowly and grimly that feeling discouraged about the world is not quite clever. I have noticed it, too, in watching other people--men I know. If I could take all the men I know who are living and acting as if they believed big things about people to-day, men who are daily taking for granted great things in human nature, and put them in one group by themselves all together, and if I could then take all the men I know who are taking little things for granted in one another and in human nature, I do not believe very many people would find it hard to tell which group would be more clever. Possibly the reason more of us do not spend more time in being hopeful about the world is that it takes more brains usually than we happen to have at the moment. Hope may be said to be an act of the brain in which it sees facts in relations large enough to see what they are for, an act in which it insists in a given case upon giving the facts room enough to turn around and to relate themselves to one another, and settle down where they belong in one"s mind, the way they would in real time.
So now, at last, Gentle Reader, having looked back and having looked forward, I know the way I am going.
I am going to hope.
It is the only way to see through things. The only way to dare to see through ones" self; the only way to see through other people and to see past them, and to see with them and for them--is to hope.
So I am putting the challenge to the reader, in this book, as I have put it to myself.
There are four questions with which day by day we stand face to face:
1. Does human nature change?
2. Does it change toward a larger and longer vision?
3. Will not a larger and longer vision mean new kinds and new sizes of men?
4. Will not new sizes of men make new-sized ethics practical and make a new world?
Everything depends for every man upon this planet, at this moment, on how he decides these questions. If he says Yes, he will live one kind of life, he will live up to his world. If he says No, he will have a mean world, smaller-minded than he is himself, and he will live down to it.
This is what the common run of men about us--the men of less creative type in literature, in business, and in politics--are doing. They do not believe human nature is changing. They are living down to a world that is going by. They are living down to a world that is smaller than they are themselves. They are trying to make others do it. They answer the question "Does human nature change?" by "No!" Wilbur Wright, when he flew around over the heads of the people in New York a few years ago, a black speck above a whole city with its heads up, answered "Yes!"