But that may or may not be. All I know is that in this book, and in a grave national crisis like this I do not want to tell other people what they ought to do.
A large part of what is the matter with the world this minute is the way telling other people what they ought to do, is being attended to.
I do not dare, for one, to let myself go. I am afraid I would be among the worst if I got started joining in the scrimmage of setting everybody right.
During the last three months, the more desperate the state of the world gets from day to day, the more I feel that the only safe person for me to write to or for me to give good advice to, is myself.
I have always carried what I call a Day Book in my pocket and if anything happens to my mind or to my pocket book--in a railway station, in a trolley car, or on a park bench, or up on Mount Tom--wherever I am, I put it down--put it down with the others and see what it makes happen to me.
As the reader will see, the things that follow are taken out bodily from this book to myself.
On the other hand I want to say deliberately before anybody goes any further and in order to be fair all around, this is a book or rather part of a book a hundred million people would write if they had time. It has been written to express certain things a hundred million people want during the next four years from the next President, and with the end in view of getting them, I am bringing up in it certain things I have thought of that I would do, and begin to do, next week if I were the hundred million people.
I do not think I could deny in court on a Bible, if driven to it, that if the hundred million people were to sit down and write a book just now, I really believe it would be--at least in the main gist and spirit of it, like mine.
Nearly every man in the hundred million people--in what we call helplessly "the public group" and looking on at strikes would be ready, except in his own strike, to write a book like this.
I cannot prove this about my book, but the hundred million people can prove it and do something that will prove it.
And the two great political parties in their coming conventions--one or both of them, I believe, is going to be obliged to give them a chance to try. But it is not up to me. Copying off this book is as far as I go with people.
And the book is not to them. It is not even for them. This book is to me.
I have been trying to save my soul with it in the cataclysm of a world.
It is easy and light-hearted, but take it off its guard every laugh is a prayer or a cry.
II
IF I WERE A NATION
Economics, I suspect, are much simpler than they look.
The soul of a people is as simple, direct and human in getting connected up with a body and having the use of a body, in this world, as a man is.
Why should I propose, if I were a nation--just because I am being a hundred million people instead of one, to let myself be frowned down as a human being, by figures, muddled by the Multiplication Table--by a really simple thing like there being so many of me?
I am human--a plain fellow human being--and if the United States would act more like me or act as practically almost any man I know would act, when it is really put up to him--forty nations in his yard waiting for him to do what he ought to do, our present view of our present problem would at once become direct and deep and simple.
All that is the matter with it is that so many Senates have sat on it.
Reduce it to its lowest terms, boil it down, boil even a Senate down to one human being being human--boil it down to a baby even--and what it would do would be deep, direct and wise. A baby would at least keep on being human and close to essentials.
And that is all there is to it.
The other things that awe us and befuddle us all come from our not being as human as we are, from our being more like Senators and from being on Committees.
The other day in Russia a thousand employees took their employer away from his desk, chucked him into a wheelbarrow at the door, rolled him home through the crowds in the streets and told him to stay there.
The crowds laughed. And the thousand employees went back saying they would run the factory themselves.
A little while afterward, when the thousand employees had tried running the factory without the employer they sent a Committee up to the house to ask him to come back to his desk.
He told the Committee he would not return with them. He said that a committee could not get him. The thousand men had rolled him away through jeers in the streets in a wheelbarrow, and now if the thousand men wanted him they could come with their wheelbarrow and roll him back.
The thousand came with their wheelbarrow and rolled him back.
The crowds laughed.
But the thousand men and their employer were sober and happy--had some imagination about each other and went to work.
If I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"
In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human, by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other"s imaginations.
The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern industrial life.
These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.
III
WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO
The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the next row with his employee.
The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing alongside him in the next row.
To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what he does at his desk.
A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious to a laboring man.
In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has to do is to find a subst.i.tute for hoeing in the next row.
His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he is and see the perspiration on his brow.
The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course, but how can he make it look so?
In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a ma.s.sive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to workmen the way they work.
Very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--with the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks hoeing their workmen"s imaginations.