CHAPTER XIII

NEWS-PAPERS

I went one day six months ago to the Mansion House and heard Lord Grey, and Lord Robert Cecil, and Mr. T.C. Taylor and others address the annual meeting of the Labour Copartnership a.s.sociation.

I found myself in the presence of a body of men who believe that Englishmen are capable of bigger and better things than many men believe they are capable of. They refuse to evade the issue of the coal strike and to agree with the socialists who have given up believing that English employers can be competent and who merely believe that we will have to rely on our governments now to be employers, and they refuse to agree with the syndicalists, who believe in human nature still less and have given up on employers and on governments both.

I have retained three impressions as a result of the meeting.

The first was that it was the most significant and impressive event since the coal strike, that it brought the whole industrial issue to a point and summed the coal strike up.

The second impression was one of surprise that the hall was not full.

The third impression came the next day when I looked through the papers for accounts of what had been said and of what it stood for.

It was noted pleasantly and hurriedly as one of the day's events. It was just one more of those shadowy things that flicker on the big foolish, drifting, rolling attention of a world a second and are gone.

People were given a few inches.

I read in the papers that same day a quite long account of a discussion of nine bishops for five hours (meeting at the same time) on a matter of proper clothes for clergymen.

I would have said of that meeting of the Labour Copartnership a.s.sociation--that it was a meeting of a Society for Defence and Protection of Longer Possible Religion on the Earth--but the clergy out of all the invitations, did not seem very largely to have had time to be there.

I wondered too a little about the papers, as I hunted through them.

It set one to thinking if anything serious to the nation would have happened, if possibly during the coal strike the London papers had devoted as much attention to T.C. Taylor--a mutual interest employer--and to how he runs his business--as to Horatio Bottomley?

Possibly too what Mr. Sandow prefers to have people drink is not so important--perhaps whole pages of it at a time--as Amos Mann and how he runs his shoe business without strikes, or as Joseph Bibby and how he makes oil cakes and loyal workmen together.

I read the other day of a clergyman in New Jersey--who was organizing a league of all the left-handed men in the world. Everything is being organized, whether or no. Some one has financed him. There will be some one very soon now who will pay the bill for organizing the attention of a world and for deciding the fate of human nature. It would be worth while spending possibly one fortune on getting human nature to settle decisively and once for all whether it has any reason to believe in itself or not. Why have a world at all--one like this? Do we want it?

Who wants it? What do we want instead? We will advertise and find out.

We will spend millions of pounds and Dreadnoughts, even national beer-bills on it, if necessary, on making everybody know that mentally competent business men--mutual-interest employers, and mentally competent workmen--mutual-interest workmen, can be produced by the human race. When everybody knows that this is true, nine out of ten Parliamentary questions would be settled, the Churches would again have a chance to be noticed, and education and even religion could be taken seriously. There would be some object in being a teacher perhaps once more and in making teaching again a great profession. There would be some object perhaps in even being an artist. The world would start off on a decent, self-respecting theory or vision about itself. Things could begin to be done in society once more, soundly, permanently, humanly and from the bottom up.

We would go out on the streets again--rich and poor--and look in each other's faces. We would take up our morning papers without a sinking at the heart.

And the men who have stopped believing in men and who merely believe in machines would be indicted before the bar of mankind. We would see them slowly filing back, one by one, to where they belong--on the back seats of the world.

The newspapers in England and America seem to think that in their business of rolling the world along, what they find themselves confronted with just now is an economic problem.

The problem that the newspapers are really confronted with, as a matter of fact, is one with which newspaper men big and little are more competent to deal than they would be with an expert problem in economics. The real problem that newspapers are confronted with every night, every morning, to-day, is a problem in human nature.

Some people believe that human nature can be believed in, and others do not. The socialists, the syndicalists, the trades unionists, as a cla.s.s, and the capitalists as a cla.s.s, are acting as if they did not. A great many inventors, and a great many workmen, all the more bold and inventive workmen, and many capitalists and great organizers of facts and of men, are acting as if they believed in human nature.

Which are right? Can a mutual-interest employer, can a mutual-interest worker, be produced by the human race? There are some of us who answer that this is a matter of fact, that this type of man can be produced, is already produced, and is about to be reproduced indefinitely.

The moment we can convince trades unions and convince employers that this is true we will change the face of the earth.

Why not change the face of the earth now?

In this connection I respectfully submit three considerations:

1st. If all employers of the world to-morrow morning knew what Lord Grey (as President of the Labour Copartnership a.s.sociation) knows to-day about copartnership--the hard facts about the way copartnership works in calling out human nature--in nerving and organizing labour, every employer in the world to-morrow would begin to take an att.i.tude toward labour which would result in making strikes and lockouts as impracticable, as incredible, as moony, as visionary forever as ideals of a world without strikes look now.

2nd. If all the workmen of the world to-morrow morning knew what Frederick Taylor (the American engineer) knows about planning workmen's work so that they receive, for the same expenditure of strength, a third more wages every day, the whole att.i.tude of labour in every nation and of the trades unions of the world--the att.i.tude of doing as little work as possible, of labouring and studying and slaving away to discover ways of not being of any use to employers--would face about in a day.

3rd. What Lord Grey knows about copartnership and the way it works is in the form of ascertainable, communicable, and demonstrable facts. What Frederick Taylor knows and what he has been doing with human beings and with steel and pig iron and with bricks and other real things is in the form of history that has been making for thirty years--and that can be looked up and proved.

Why should not everybody who employs labour know what Lord Grey knows?

And why should not all workmen know what a few thousand workmen who have been trained under Frederick Taylor to work under better conditions and with more wages, know?

If I were an inspired millionaire the first thing I would do to-morrow would be to supply the funds and find the men who should take up what Lord Grey knows about employers, and what Frederick Taylor knows about workmen, and put it where all who live shall see it and know it. I would spend my fortune in proving to the world, in making everybody know and believe that the mutual-interest business man and the mutual-interest workman have been produced and can be produced and shall be produced by the human race.

The problem of the fate of the world in its essential nature and in its spiritual elements and gifts--has come to be in this age of the press a huge advertising problem--a great adventure in human attention.

The most characteristic and human and natural way, and the only profound and permanent way to handle the quarrel between Capital and Labour is by placing certain facts--certain rights-of-all-men-to-know, into the hands of some disinterested and powerful statesman of publicity--some great organizer of the attention of a world. He would have to be a practical pa.s.sionate psychologist, a man gifted with a bird's-eye view of publics--a discoverer of geniuses and crowds, a natural diviner or reader of the hearts of men. He shall search out and employ twenty men to write as many books addressed to as many cla.s.ses and types of employers and workers. He shall arrange pamphlets for every dooryard that cannot help being read.

He shall reach trades unions by using the cinema, by having some master of human appeal take the fate of labour, study it out in pictures--and the truth shall be thrown night after night and day after day on a hundred thousand screens around a world. He shall organize and employ wide publicity or rely on secret and careful means on different aspects of the issue according to the nature of the issue, human nature and common sense, and organize his campaign to reach every type of person, every temperament, and order of circ.u.mstance, each in its own way.

What Lord Grey knows and what Frederick Taylor's workmen know shall be put where all who live shall see it where every employer, every workman, every workman's wife and every growing boy and girl that is pa.s.sing by, as on some vast billboard above the world, shall see it--shall see and know and believe that employers that are worth believing in--and that workmen who can work and who are skilled and clever enough to love to work--can still be produced by the human race.

If I were a newspaper man I would start what might be called Pull Together Clubs in every community, men in all walks of life, little groups of crowdmen or men in the community who could not bear not to see a town do team work.

I would use these Pull Together Clubs in every community as means of gathering and distributing news--as local committees on the national campaign of touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital.

"_Without Vision the People perish_."

I would begin with spending five million dollars on a vision for the people.

What would I do with a five-million-dollar fund for touching the imagination of labour and touching the imagination of capital?

First: preliminary announcement in all papers and in all public ways, asking names and addresses of workmen who have already proved and established their belief in copartnership.

Names and addresses of employers in the same way.

Second: names and addresses of workmen who would believe in it if they could; who believe in the principle theoretically and would be interested in seeing how it could be practically and technically proved.

Names and addresses of employers in the same way.

Third: selection of one firm in each industry, the best and most strategically placed to carry it out in that industry, and placing the facts before them.

Selection of the leading workmen out of all the workmen in the nation employed in that industry, who would be willing to work with such a firm.

Fourth: a selection of travelling secretaries to visit trades unions and get provisional permission and toleration for these workmen so that they can take copartnership places under such a firm with the consent of their fellows and he set one side for experimental purposes, under the protection of the trades union rules.

Fifth: I would find the most promising trades-union branch in each industry and I would try to get this branch to take it up with the other branches until all trades unions were brought to admit copartnership members on special terms.