IV
THE CALL OF A WORLD
The difference between a first class nation and a second class nation might be illustrated by the history of almost any live man in any live profession.
Dentists at first pulled teeth and put in new ones. Then they began filling them. Now people are paying dentists high prices for keeping them so that they have no teeth to fill.
Orthopedic practice has gone through the same revolution. A bone doctor used to be called in after a leg was broken, and set it. To-day we see a doctor in a hospital take up a small boy, hold him firmly in his hands, and break his legs so that he will have straight legs for life. The next stage probably will be to begin with bow-legged babies, take their bones and bend them straight when they are soft, or educate their mothers—to keep them from walking too soon.
The essential thing that has happened to dentistry is that they now kill the germs that decay the teeth.
The first natural thing for the Red Cross to do would be the day after the armistice to go back to war germs.
The Red Cross with its branches in every town and every nation in the world would announce that from that day on, through a vast new division, it would occupy itself with germs—with the germs of six inch guns, with the germs of submarines. It would deal with the embryology of war.
The germs of war between nations, breed in wars between classes, and the germs of class war breed in the wars between persons, and the germs of war between men and men breed in each man's not keeping peace with himself.
It is when I am having a hard time getting on with Stanley Lee that I am likely to have a row with Ivy Lee. It is a colossal understatement to say that charity begins at home. Everything does. If a man understands himself he can understand anybody. If he gets on with himself the world will fall into his hands.
The great short cut to stopping war between peoples is to stop war between capital and labor. This is a feat of personality and of engineering in human nature. It is a home-job, and when we have done it at home we can sow all nations with it. If I wanted to stop a war between Ivy Lee and me I would have to pick out a series of things to do to Ivy Lee and to say to him which he would like to have me do and say to him. Then I would pick out in myself things that Ivy Lee does not like to have me do to him and say to him, and which possibly when I study on them I will not want to do.
Up to Ivy to do the same to me.
This is a science. It is not merely a vision or a religion. Removing the cause of fighting may be a less exact science of mutual study and self-study, but it is approximately exact. It is also a fascinating and contagious science. We master the embryology of war between persons—the embryology of war between classes, and then between nations. The principles which we demonstrate and set up working samples of in one of these problems will prove to be the principles of the others.
If people do not believe in germs enough and are more afraid of fire, I would change the figure.
We are proposing to follow up at once, the Red Cross, which was run as a fire engine to put or help put out fires between nations, with the Air Line League which is to be run as a machine for not letting fires between nations get started.
Edward A. Filene of Boston in trying to have a successful department store found the women behind his counters got very tired standing in the street cars night and morning on the way home and took up with a will getting new rapid transit for Boston. He found he could not get rapid transit for Boston without helping to get a new government and that he could not get a new government without helping to get a new Boston.
He then found he could not help get a new Boston without getting new trade and industrial conditions in Boston and that he could not help get new ideals working in trade and industry in Boston without helping in the ideals of a nation. He then found he could not get a new nation without trying to help make several new nations. Then came the International Chamber of Commerce.
Something like this seems to happen to nearly every man I know who really accomplishes anything.
Or any nation.
Frederick Van Eeden of Holland began life as a painter with marked success but being a lively and interested man he could not help wondering why people were not getting out of paintings in Holland—his own and other people's, what they ought to and what they used to, and became a critic. He found people did not respond to his ideas of how they ought to enjoy things and then won distinction as a poet, but why did not more people get more out of the best poetry? He then wrote one or two novels of high quality which Holland was proud of and which were read in several languages, but why did not the people read novels of a high character as much as they did the poorer ones?
He decided that it was because people were physically underorganized and not whole in body and mind—like the Greeks, and became a physician.
He thought he was being thorough when he became a physician but soon found that he was not getting down to the causes after all, of people's not having whole bodies and fine senses capable of appreciating the finer things and soon came to the conclusion that for the most part what was the matter with their bodies was due to what was wrong in their habits of thought and in their minds, and became an alienist and founded the first psycho-therapeutic hospital in Holland.
He then found that in what was the matter with people's minds, he was still superficial and that people's minds were wrong because of the social and industrial conditions, ideals and institutions under which they were conceived and born, and had to live.
He then devoted himself to being a publicist and sociologist, had charge of bread for the poor during the great bread riots in Amsterdam and is now engaged in grappling nationally and internationally with industrial and civil war as the cause of all failures of men and nations to express and fulfill their real selves in the world.
Any nation that wants to be a great nation and to fulfill and express itself and be a first class nation will sooner or later find that it has to go on from one individual personal interest to another until it finds it is doing practically what Frederick Van Eeden did.
The only way to look out for, or to express oneself is to try to help everybody else to.
The Red Cross at the end of the war in making elaborate and international arrangements to run a pleasant and complimentary ambulance to the relief of disease in society that society was deliberately creating every day, instead of taking advantage at the end of the war of the trust all classes had in it, and taking advantage of the attention of forty nations, of society's best and noblest need, to keep society from causing the disease, chose to be superficial, faced away from its vision, fell behind the people, absconded from the leadership of the world.
The aches and pains of society with which since the war, the Red Cross so politely and elegantly deals, which with white kid gloves and without hurting our feelings it spends our money to relieve are all caused by the things we daily do to each other to make the money.
The vision of the common people in America recognizes this and recognized it instantly at the end of the war. The hearts of the men and women of America to-day, are at once too bitter, too deep and too hopeful not to instantly lose interest in a Red Cross which asks them to help run it as a beautiful superficial ambulance to the evils people are doing to one another instead of as a machine to help them not to do them.
V
MISSOURI
The best service America can render other nations to-day is be herself—fulfill and make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri would probably agree with me in this.
Where I differ with Senator Reed is in what America should propose to do to make the most of herself.
Senator Reed of Missouri judging from reports of his speeches in the Senate wants America in the present distraction of nations to stop thinking of the others, wizen up and be safe.
It seems to me that if America were to cut herself off from the rest of the world in its hour of need and just shrivel up into thinking of herself she would fail to fulfill herself and be like herself. She would just be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Nothing could be less safe for America just now than to be like Senator Reed of Missouri.
Senator Reed puts forward a patriotism which is sincere but reckless. In the Senate of fifty states, Reed says "I'm from Missouri." In the congress of nations, Reed says "America über Alles." "The world for America." "America for Missouri." "Missouri for Me!"
For America just at the present moment in the world it has got to belong to, to turn away and stop being interested in the whole world and in everybody in it and in what everybody is going to do and be kept from doing—is like a man's shutting himself up in his own stateroom and being interested in his own port hole in a ship that is going down. It seems more sensible for America—even from the point of view of looking out for herself—not to go down with Senator Reed and moon around in his stateroom with him, but to be deeply interested in the whole ship, and in the engines, the wheelhouse and the pumps.
Patriotism that just shuts a nation up into a private stateroom nation by itself or that makes a nation just live with its own life preserver on, to preserve its own life preserver, can end either for Senator Reed or for America in but one way.
It's going to end in a plunge of the ship.
It is going to end in Senator Reed's running out, and running up to the deck the last minute.
I do not know how other people feel about it, but it seems to me that from the point of view of intelligent self-interest, the spectacle of Senator Reed of Missouri, tying Missouri like a millstone around his neck and then casting himself, Missouri and all, into the sea, while it may have a certain tragic grandeur in it, can hardly be said to be a practical or business-like example for his country.
I would like to show if I can that Senator Reed is wrong, and to present the alternative patriotism we propose to stand for in the Air Line League.
The Germans have said (and have spent forty billion dollars in saying it) that democracy cannot be made to work. They sneered at us during the war and said to England, America and the rest of us that we could not make democracy work in running an army and keep up with Germans in war, and they are sneering at us now that we cannot make democracy work in industry and keep up with Germans in peace.
Forty nations half-believe that the Germans are right about industrial democracy, about democracy's not being a real, sincere, every day thing, a thing every man can have the good of all day every day of his life, and a good many people in America—extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals, agree or act as if they agreed with the Germans.
If the Germans are right about this, it is very absent-minded for America to pay very much attention just now to her industries. If America is living in a world as insane as Germany says it is, the one thing ahead for us to do, and do for the next thirty years, with all the other forty nations, is to breed men-children, and train men-children fast enough and grimly enough to be ready to murder the young men of other nations before they murder ours.
Everything must be geared and geared at once to the Germans' being right.
Or it must be geared and geared at once to their being wrong, to challenging the Germans—to telling them that they are as fooled about what industrial democracy can do in peace, as they were with what it could do in war.
The one thing we can do in America now to get the Germans or anybody else to believe us about industrial democracy is to make American democracy in industry whip German militarism in industry out of sight in our own labor unions and in our own factories. Then we will whip German militarism in industry out of the markets of the world.
If the quickest way for the American people to get a decent world—a world we want to do business in, is to whip German militarism in industry, and if the quickest way to whip German militarism abroad is to whip it at home, why is it we are not everywhere opening up our factories, calling in our money and our men and settling down to work?
What is it that is scaring capital and labor away and holding back money and men?
The fear of the United States Senate.
The fear and coma of war in all nations, among the men who furnish money and men who furnish labor, while awaiting for the United States Senate and other governments not to be afraid of war.
The first item on the business schedule of every nation to-day is to stop this fear.
The first way to stop this fear we have of other nations abroad is to stop our fear of one another at home, is to watch people we know all about us, at desks, at benches and machines on every side, who all day every day are making peace work between classes, better than war does. Making democracy work in business is the first condition, for America and the world of having any business.
It is not merely in behalf of other nations, but in behalf of ourselves, that I am advocating the direct action of the people welded together into one mass organization, to secure by the direct daily action of the three classes together the rights of industrial democracy for each of them. The Air Line League is proposed not as a bearing-on organization but as a standing-by or big-brother organization guarding the free initiative, the voluntary self-control of labor and capital and the public, the team work and mutual self-expression and self-fulfillment of all classes.
The whole issue is all folded up in this one issue of industrial democracy—in proving to people by advertising it to them and by dramatizing it to them that industrial democracy works.
It is because the Germans believe that men who have been forced against their wills to do team work, are more efficient, can produce more and compete more successfully than enthusiastic and voluntary men doing team work because they understand and want to, that Germany is a second-class nation and that the German people have had to put up for forty years with being second-class human beings. They have a ruling majority of second-class human beings in Germany because they have the most complete and most exhaustive arrangements any nation has ever dreamed of, for making second-class human beings out of practically anybody—arrangements for howling down to people, for telling people what they have got to do as a substitute for the slower, deeper, more productive course of making them want to do it.
Taking the line of least resistance—the mechanical course in dealing with human nature, makes America's being a second-class nation a matter of course.
What we have always been hoping for in America is that in due time we are going to be a first-class nation—a nation crowded with men and women who, wherever they have come from, or whether or not they were first class when they came, have been made first class by the way that all day every day in their daily work they have been treated by the rest of us when they come to us, and by the way they treat one another.
VI
A VICTORY LOAN ADVERTISEMENT
May 10, 1919
THE BOY WHO STUCK HIS FOOT IN
A small boy the other day walked up to one of those splendid marble pillars before the The Victory Arch and stuck his foot in.
I went over and stooped down and felt of the crust. It was about an inch and a half thick.
Then I stood in the middle of The Avenue, all New York boiling and swirling round me and looked up at The Arch of Victory—massive, majestic white and heavenly and soaring against the sky, and my heart ached!
Something made me feel suddenly close to the small boy.
What he wanted to know with his foot, was what this splendid Victory Arch he had watched his big brave brothers march under and flags wave under, and bands play through four hours, was made of; how much it amounted to—how deep the glory had struck in.
I thought what a colossal tragical honest monument it was of our victory over the Germans ... forty nations swinging their hats and hurrahing and eighty-seven million unconquered sullen Germans before our eyes in broad daylight making a national existence from now on, out of not paying their bills! ... eighty-seven million Germans we have all got to devote ourselves nationally to sitting on the necks of six hundred years.
I am not sorry the small boy stuck his foot in. Millions of Americans though in a politer way are doing it all this week. We want to poke through to the truth. We want something more than a theater property Victory Arch, our soldier boys marching under it as if it were a real one!
We want four and a half billion dollars this week to make it honest—to take down our lath and plaster Arch and put it up in marble instead.
We make this week a wager to the world,—a four and a half billion dollar dare or cry to God that we are not a superficial people, that the American people will not be put off with a candy victory, all sugar and hurrahs and tears and empty watery words—that we will chase Peace up, that we will work Victory down into the structure of all nations—into the eternal underpinning of a world.
In the meantime this glorious alluring, sneering beckoning Victory Arch, all whipped cream and stone froth, a nation's gigantic tragic angel cake, with its candy guns and its frosting on it and before our eyes the grim unconquered souls of eighty-seven million Germans marching through!
We will let it stand haunting us, beckoning us along to a victory no small boy, no Bolshevik nation can stick its foot in!
When I corrected the proof of this advertisement—it was the last advertisement of the last week of the last Liberty Loan in New York—it was not as true of our victory and of the world's victory over the Germans as it is now. And The Arch of Victory in Madison Square has melted away into roar.
But the truth I have spoken has not melted away.
What The Air Line League is for in its national and international organization of the will of a free people to make democracy work, is to answer the boy who stuck his foot in.
RECONSTRUCTION
I started this book taking the Crowd for my hero—that faint bodiless phantasmagoric presence, that helpless fog or mist of humanity called the People.
I have proceeded upon two premises.
A spirit not connected with a body is without a technique, without the mechanical means of self-expression or self-fulfillment. It is a ghost trying to have a family.
A body not connected with its spirit is without a technique for seeing what to do. It is without the spiritual means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. It is like a sewing-machine trying to have a family.
Some of my readers will remember a diagram in "Crowds" in which I divided people off roughly into
I have based what I have to say in the next few chapters on this anatomy or rather this biology of a nation's human nature.
In the next few pages I am dealing not with the reconstruction but with the reconception of a nation.
Reconstruction is a dead difficult laborious thing to try to put off on a boundless superabundant ganglion of a hundred million lives like the American people.
In the crisis that confronts America to-day not only the most easy, but the most natural and irresistible way for this nation to be a great nation is to fall in love.
I am enlarging in these next few pages upon how crowds and experts—that is: crowds and their men of vision and engineers can come to an understanding and get together.
I wish to state certain particular things I think are going to be done by the people—that the people may be conscious of themselves, may be drawn into the vision of the world and of themselves, that in this their great hour in history, a great people may be born again.
II
NATIONAL BIOLOGY
A man in being born the first time is the invention of others. Being born again is the finding of oneself, oneself,—the spiritual invention of one's own life.
Being born again is far more intelligent than being born the first time.
All one has to do to see this, is to look about and see the people who have done it.
When one is being born the first time one does not even know it. One is not especially intelligent the first time and could not really help it. And nobody else could help it.
When one is being born again it takes all one can know and all one can know and do, and all everybody around one knows, and all everybody around can do, to help one do it. In 1776 when America was being born first, America did not have the slightest idea of what was happening. It has taken one hundred and forty-four birthdays to guess.
A nation is born the first time with its eyes shut.
But in this terrible 1920 when America is being born again, she can only manage to be born again by knowing all about herself, by disrobing herself to be born again, by a supreme colossal act of self-devotion, self-discovery, self-consciousness and consciousness of the world, naked before God, reading the hearts of forty nations, a thousand years and the unborn, and knowing herself,—slipping off her old self and putting on her new self.
III
THE AIR LINE LEAGUE
The first thing a spirit in this world usually does to find a body is to select a father and mother. The American people if it is to be embodied and have the satisfaction and power of making itself felt and expressing itself, can only do so by following the law of life.
A hundred million people can only get connected with a body, acquire a presence—find itself as a whole, the way each one of the hundred million people did alone.
In a nation's being born again three types of mind are necessarily involved.
The minds in America that create or project, the inventors.
The minds that bring up.
The minds that conceive and bring to the birth.
These three classes of spiritual forces are concerned in America in making the people stop being a ghost, in making their American people as an idea, physically fit.
The first thing to be arranged for America to make the people quit being a ghost in The White House, is to form into three bodies or organizations, these three, groups of men—make these three groups of men class-conscious, self-conscious, conscious of their own power and purpose in America—and have everybody in America conscious of them. I propose three organizations to stand for these three life-forces, three organizations which will act—each of which will act with the other two and will follow out for a nation, as individuals do for individuals, the law of life—of producing and reproducing the national life.
The minds that are creative will discover and project a national idea for the people—the inventors, will act as one group.
The minds that conceive and bring the idea to the birth, that bring the idea to pass, called engineers, will act as another, and the minds that teach, bring up, draw out and apply the idea and relate the idea to life—will act as another.
I propose a club of fifty thousand creative men be selected and act together—that a nation may be conceived.
I propose that fifty thousand engineers or how-men, men who think out ways and means, be selected and act together, that the nation that is conceived may be born.
These two Clubs will have their national headquarters together in a skyscraper hotel of their own in New York and will act together—in bringing an idea for the people into the world.
The third Club—twenty or thirty million people, on the scale of the Red Cross—in ten thousand cities, will apply and educate the idea, bring it up and put it through.
What one's soul is for, I suppose, is that one can use it when one likes, to contemplate and to enjoy an Idea.
What one has a body for with reference to an idea is to take it up, try it out and put it through.
The Air Line League proposes to coördinate these three functions and operate as a three in one club.
The idea would be to call the first of the clubs, the club of inventors, the Look-Up Club. The second, a club of how-men and engineers, the Try-Out Club, and the third—the operating club of the vast body of the people taking direct action and putting the thing through locally and nationally would be called The Put-Through Clan.
The Air Line League through these three clubs will undertake to help the people to stop being an abstraction, to swear off from being a Ghost in their own house. The great working majority of the American people—of the men and the women who made the Red Cross so effective during the war, which came to the rescue of the people of the nation with the people of other nations, will come to the rescue now, during the war the people are having and that the classes of people are having with one another.
IV
THE LOOK-UP CLUB LOOKS UP
§ 1.For Instance.
Such a crisis as this nation has now, Springfield, Massachusetts, had once.
Springfield a few years ago, all in a few weeks, threw up the chance of being Detroit because two or three automobile men who belonged in Springfield and wanted to make Springfield as prosperous as Detroit, were practically told to go out to Detroit and find the men who would have the imagination to lend them the money—to make Springfield into a Detroit.
Naturally when they found bankers with imagination in Detroit they stayed there.
What happened to Springfield is what is going to happen to America if we do not make immediate national arrangements for getting men who have imagination in business in this country, men who can invent manpower, to know each other and act together.
The twenty-five hundred dollars Frank Cousins of Detroit recognized Henry Ford with, a few years ago, he gave back the other day to Henry Ford for twenty-nine million dollars.
People say as if that was all there was to it, that the fate of this nation to-day turns on our national manpower.
But what does our national man-power turn on?
It turns on people's knowing and knowing in the nick of time, a man when they see one.
Man-power in a democracy like ours turns on having inventors, bankers and crowds act together.
Sometimes banks hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with inventors or men of practical imagination.
This is called conservatism.
Sometimes it is the crowds and laborers who hold things back by being afraid to coöperate with leaders or men of imagination.
But the fate of all classes turns upon our having men of creative imagination believed in by men who furnish money, and believed in by men who furnish labor.
The idea of the Look-Up Club is that men of creative imagination shall be got together, shall be made class-conscious, shall feel and use their power themselves and put it where other people can use it.
How much time and how many years of producing-power would it have saved America if Alexander Graham Bell had known or could have had ready to appeal to, America's first hundred thousand picked men of imagination, when he was trudging around ringing doorbells in Boston, trying to supply people with imagination enough to see money in telephones?
If William G. McAdoo, when he had invented with his tunnels, a really great conception of the greater New York, and was fighting to get people in New York to believe in it, and act on it, had had an organization of one hundred thousand picked men of imagination in the nation at large to appeal to—one hundred thousand men picked out by one another to put a premium on constructive imagination when they saw some, instead of a penalty on it, how much time would it have saved New York and saved McAdoo? How much time would a national Club like this save this nation to-day and from now on in its race with the Germans?
Why should our men of practical creative imagination to-day waste as much time running around and asking permission of people who had none, as McAdoo had to?
If a hundred thousand silver dollars—just ordinary silver dollars—were put together in a row in New York on a sidewalk, everybody going by would have imagination at once about the one hundred thousand silver dollars and what could be done with them.
But put one hundred thousand picked men—or men of exceptional power together in a row in New York—and why is it everybody is apt to feel at first a little vague and troubled about them, stands off around the corner and wonders what can be done with one hundred thousand immortal human beings?
I wish people would have as much imagination about what could be done with one hundred thousand fellow human beings picked out and got together from the men of this nation, as they would have about one hundred thousand silver dollars.
This is one of the first things the Look-Up Club is for, to get people to be inspired by a hundred thousand men put together, in the same way that they are by a hundred thousand dollars put together.
I went out last night and walked up the Great White Way and looked at the little flock of hotels that are standing to-day on the site of my faith in these hundred thousand men—the site of the new hotel—the little sleeping shelf in the roar of New York for the hundred thousand men to have on Broadway.
I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and —— told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by —— the other day as worth four and a half million dollars.
The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone.
The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York.
What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning?
All I could do alone would be to walk.
As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep.
This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others.
What will we do, what ideas will we carry out?
Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out?
What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this.
What we are doing is not to get values together, but the men who keep creating the values.
The men who have created already the values of five thousand cities, shall now create values for a nation.
I am not writing to people—to the hundred thousand men who are going to be nominated to the Look-Up Club—to ask them whether they think this idea of mine—of having the first hundred thousand men of vision of this country in a Club, is going through or not.
I am writing them and asking them if—if it is going through—they want to belong to it.
Very few men can speak with authority—even if they would, as to what the other ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men will possibly do or not do with my idea in this book. But any man can speak with authority and speak immediately when he gets to the end of it, as to how he feels himself, whether he wants or likes the idea, and wants to count one to bring the idea to pass.
I speak up for myself in this book. Anybody can see it. If every man will confine himself in the same way, and will stake off himself and attend to himself at the end of this book and say what he wants—we will all get what we want.
The proposition looks rather big, mathematically, but looked at humanly, it is a simple straight human-nature question. All I really ask of each man who is nominated is,
"If the first hundred thousand men who have imagination in business are being selected and brought together out of all the other business men in America, do you want to be one of them? Who are the ten, twenty or fifty men of practical vision in business—especially young men, you think ought not to be left out?"
It is all an illusion about numbers and sizes of things.
The way to be national is to be personal, for each man to take sides with the best in himself.
Suddenly across a nation we look in a hundred thousand faces.
§ 2.Why the Look-Up Club Looks Up.
The Constitution does not provide for an Imagination Department for the United States Government.
It has judicial, executive and legislative departments, but a department made up of men of vision to create, conceive and reconceive, go deeper and see further than law and restraints can go, does not exist in our Government.
We have a Judicial Department to decide on whether what is born has a right to live—a Legislative Department to pass rules under on how it shall be obliged to live—and an Executive Department to make it mind—but the department to create and to conceive for the people is lacking.
Government at best is practically a dear uncle or dear maiden-aunt institution.
Government as a physical expression is without functions of reproduction.
Government—contrary to the theory of the Germans—from the point of view of sheer power in projecting and determining the nature and well-being of men—the fate of men and the world—is superficial, is a staid, standardized, unoriginal affair—devoted to ready-made ideas like the Red Cross during the war.
This is what is the matter with a Government's posing in this or any other nation as a live body for the people.
The spontaneous uprising of business men during the war—the spectacle of the dollar a year men overwhelming and taking over the government, the breaking in of the National Council of Defense—the spontaneous combustion of millions of free individuals into one colossal unit like the Red Cross—all the other outbreaks of the creative vital power of the superior people of the nation, all point to the fact that when new brain tracks are called for, the natural irresistible way is to find individual persons who have them, who make them catching to other individual persons, and who then give body to them across the nation.
Its whole nature and action of a Government tend to make Government and most of the people in it mechanical.
In the nature of things and especially in the nature of human nature, this nation—if its new ideas and its new brain tracks are to come to anything at all, they must have a spontaneous willful and comparatively free origin and organization of their own.
Hence the Look-Up Club coöperating with the Try-Out Club to act as an informal Imagination Department for the United States.
V
THE TRY-OUT CLUB TRIES OUT
§ 1.I+You=We.
If Darius the Great had put the eunuchs of his court in charge as Special Commissioners for controlling the social evil in Babylon, they would have made very sad work of what they had to do because they would not have understood what it was all about. They would not have had the insight necessary to measure their job, to lay out a great engineering project in human nature, determine the difficulties and the working principles and go ahead.
What makes a man a man is the way he takes all the knowledge, the penetrating lively enriching knowledge his selfishness gives—his vision of what he wants for himself, and all the broadening enriching knowledge his unselfishness gives—his imagination about what he wants for others, and pours the two visions together.
The law of business is the law of biology—action—reaction—interaction. I + You = We.
It is getting to be reckless for the people in other nations to sit around and gossip about how bad it is for the Germans to be so selfish. It is reckless for capital to gossip about how selfish labor is—and for labor to putter away trying to make capital pure and noble like a labor union.
There are far worse things than selfishness in people.
Being fooled about oneself is worse because it is more difficult to get at, meaner, more cowardly and far more dangerous for others.
This chapter has been written so far on a pad in my pocket while inhabiting or rather being packed in as one of the bacilli with twenty other men, in the long narrow throat or gullet of a dining-car. When I was swallowed finally and was duly seated, the man who was coupled off with me—a perfect stranger who did not know he was helping me write this chapter in my book, reached out and started to hand himself the salt and then suddenly saw I might want it too and passed it to me.
He summed up in three seconds the whole situation of what democracy is, the whole question between the Germans and the other peoples of the earth.
With one gesture across a little white table he settled the fate of a world.
His selfishness, his own personal accumulated experience with an egg, made him see that he wanted salt in it.
His unselfishness made him see that I must be sitting there wanting salt in an egg as much as he did.
So he took what his selfishness made him see on the one hand and what his unselfishness made him see on the other, put them together and we had the salt together.
Incidentally he finished this chapter and dramatized (just as I was wishing somebody would before I handed it in) the idea I am trying to express in it. This in a small way is a perfect working model of what I call civilization. Unselfishness in business is not a civilization at all. It is a premature, tired, sickly, fuddle-headed heaven.
Imagination about other people based upon imagination about what one wants oneself, is the manly, unfooled, clean-cut energy that rules the world.
The appetites in people which make them selfish supply them with such a rich big equipment for knowing what other people want, that if they really use this equipment in a big business way for getting it for them, no one can compete with them.
A righteous man if he has any juice in him at all and is not a mere giver, a squush of altruism, a mere negative self-eliminating, self-give-up, self-go-without person—is a selfish person and an unselfish person mixed. What he calls his character is the proportion in which he chooses to mix himself.
Half the trouble with this poor foolish morally dawdling old world to-day is that it is still hoping fondly it is going to be pulled straight into the kingdom of heaven by morally sterilized, spiritually pasteurized persons, by men who are trying to set the world right by abolishing the passions instead of by understanding them, instead of taking the selfishness and unselfishness we all have, controlling them the way other antagonisms in nature are controlled and making them work together.
People in other nations are as selfish in their way as the Germans are in theirs—capital is as selfish as labor, or labor as capital. The fundamental virtue in modern business men, the spiritual virility that makes for power is their gift of using their selfishness to some purpose, in understanding people with whom they deal and learning how to give them what they want.
It takes more brains to pursue a mutual interest with a man than to slump down without noticing him into being an altruist with him. Any man can be a selfish man in a perfectly plain way and any man can be an altruist—if he does not notice people enough, but it takes all the brains a man has and all the religion he has to pursue with the fear of God and the love of one's kind, a mutual interest with people one would like to give something to and leave alone.
This is what I call the soul of true business and of live salesmanship.
I put it forward as the moral or spiritual basis on which the engineers in the Try-Out Club, of the Air Line League, propose to act.
The way for America to meet the German militaristic and competitive idea of business and of the business executive—the idea that brought on the war, is for America and the rest of the world to put forward something and put forward something quick, as a substitute for it, sell to themselves, sell to one another and to the Germans before it is too late, a substitute for it.
The American engineers of business or great executives—the how-men and inventors of how to bring things to pass, must put forward the pursuit of mutual interests in the largest sense, pursuit of mutual interests generously and finely conceived, the selfishness and unselfishness mixed, as this substitute.