But the real importance of the flying machine has not stopped short with a little delicate, graceful thing like walking on the air instead of the ground.
The big and really revolutionary thing about Wilbur Wright"s flying was that he changed the minds of the whole human race in a few minutes about one thing. There was one particular thing that for forty thousand years they knew they could not do. And now they knew they could.
It naturally follows--and it lies in the mind of every man who lives--that there must be other particular things. And as nine men out of ten are in business, most of these particular things are going to be done in business.
The Wilbur Wright spirit is catching.
It is as if a Lid had been lifted off the world.
One sees everywhere business men going about the street expecting new things of themselves. They expect things of the very ground, and of the air, and of one another they had not dared expect before.
The other day in a New England city I saw a man, who had been the president of an Electric Light Company for twenty years, who had invented a public service corporation that worked. Since he took office and dictated the policy of the Company, every single overture for more expensive equipment in the electric lighting of the city has come from the Company, and every single overture for reducing the rate to consumers has come from the company.
The consumption of electricity in the city is the largest _per capita_ in the world, and the rate is the cheapest in the country; and, incidentally, the Company so trusts the people that they let them have electricity without metres, and the people so trust the Company that they save its electricity as they would their own.
Even the man without a conscience, who would be mean if he could, is brought to terms, and knows that if he refrains from leaving his lights burning all night when he goes to bed he is not merely saving the Company"s electricity but his own. He knows that he is reducing his own and everybody"s price for electricity, and not merely increasing the profits of the Company.
It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day, every night, turning on and turning off their lights.
The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly, influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that city--the motives and a.s.sumptions with which they bargain with one another--that might be envied by twenty churches.
All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful personality--the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other ages--had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in business. He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in poetry or more easy and conventional ways.
If he could not have made the electric light business say the things about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he would have had to make some other business say them.
One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that could be effected by being believed in.
He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.
He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his own way for three years--in believing in people, and in inventing ways of getting believed in as much as he liked.
The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in his face.
He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.
By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing that belief, he had invented a Corporation--a Public Service Corporation--that had a soul, and consequently worked.
BOOK TWO
LETTING THE CROWDS BE GOOD
TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
They stay not in their hold These stokers, Stooping to h.e.l.l To feed a ship.
Below the ocean floors.
Before their awful doors Bathed in flame, I hear their human lives Drip--drip.
Through the lolling aisles of comrades In and out of sleep, Troops of faces To and fro of happy feet, They haunt my eyes.
Their murky faces beckon me From the s.p.a.ces of the coolness of the sea Their fitful bodies away against the skies.
CHAPTER I
SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD
It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.
Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.
But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is.
_I want to be good._
And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and live all alone on an island in the sea.
I go a step further.
I believe that the crowds want to be good.
But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite agreement on our two main points.
1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful, squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new, clean, slick planet up in s.p.a.ce, with crowds of perfect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, c.u.mbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith, Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circ.u.mstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to people about goodness.
We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some.