V
THE GHOST RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Being allowed to live a week to-day means as much as being allowed to live a whole life four years ago or perhaps four years from now.
We are being allowed to live in the splendid desperate moment of the world.
International war ending to-night.
To-morrow morning a thousand civil wars breaking out in a thousand nations—between classes—unless we all do our seeing and do our living swiftly and do it together swiftly to-day.
When one-tenth of the people of America tell the President of the United States and nine-tenths of the people that they cannot have any coal unless they do what the one-tenth say; when another one-tenth of the people tell the nine-tenths that they cannot have anything to eat, and another one-tenth tell them that they cannot have anything to wear until the one-tenth get what they want, just how much more democratic America is than Germany it is difficult to say; and just why anybody should suppose the emergency is over it is difficult to say. The idea of getting what you want by hold-up which has been taught to labor by capital, is now getting ready to be used by labor and capital both, and by everybody.
The really great immediate universal emergency to-day in America is the holdup. We get rid of one Kaiser other people have three thousand miles away, to get instead five thousand Kaisers we have to live with next door here at home, that we have to ask things of and say "please" to every time we cook, every time we eat, every time we buy something to wear.
The emergency is not only immediate but it is universal, all the people are concerned in meeting it all the time. We have said to one another and to everybody for four years that what we have all been sacrificing for and dying for these four years is to make the world safe for democracy.
This was our emergency. We were right. The emergency we are meeting now is to make democracy safe for the world. If the Kaiser wanted to dream his wildest dream of autocratic sneer and autocratic hate he would have dreamed US; he would have dreamed what we will be unless the men and women of America—especially the men and women of America formerly active in the Red Cross, shall meet the emergency and undertake in behalf of the people to prove to the people how (if anybody will go about and look it up) industrial democracy in America in distinction from industrial autocracy, really works.
If it works for some of us in some places, let twenty million people—Red Cross people get up and say across this land in every village, town and city, it shall work now in all places for all of us. And then take steps—all of them every morning, every afternoon, getting together as they did in the Red Cross, to see to it that the whole town and everybody in it does something about it.
When the soldiers of the American army we were all helping in the Red Cross stop fighting the Germans, come home, divide off into classes and begin fighting one another, why—because now the soldiers we have been helping need us more, because now all day every day they need us more than they ever dreamed of needing us when they were merely fighting Germans—why should we stop helping them?
On the day after the armistice—the very day when our war with just Germans was over, when the deeper, realer, more intimate, more desperate war Germany had precipitated upon all nations with themselves, begins, why should the men and women who had been working every afternoon for the men of this nation, in the Red Cross, talk about reducing to a peace basis?
The people in the Red Cross have been having in the last three years the vision of backing up an army of four million men fighting for the liberties of the world, but the vision that is before us now—before the same people—that we must meet and meet desperately and quickly is the vision of backing up an army of a hundred million men, women and children fighting for their own liberties in their own dooryards, fighting for the liberty to eat at their own tables, to sleep in their own beds, and to wear clothes on their backs, in a country which we have told the Germans is the greatest machinery of freedom, the greatest engine of democracy in the world.
I will not believe that the men and women of all classes who have made the Red Cross what it was, who have made the Red Cross the trusted representative of American democracy in all nations, who now find themselves facing both at home and abroad the most desperate, sublime, most stupendous chance to save democracy and to present democracy to a world, I will not believe that these men and women are going to lose their grip, wave their vision for a people away, forsake forty nations, forsake the daily heaped-up bewildered fighting of the fighters they have helped before.
The logical thing at this great moment for the people who made the Red Cross to do—the thing they alone have the record, the teamwork-drill, the experience, the machinery, the momentum to do, is to keep on following the fighters, rendering first aid to the fighters moving on with their first-aid from fighters for the rights of the people not to be bullied by kings, to fighters for the rights of all classes of people not to be bullied by everybody, not to be bullied by one another.
VI
WHAT A BODY FOR THE GHOST WOULD BE LIKE
I have always wanted to write a book an employer and a workman could read looking over each other's shoulders. I would have two chapters on every subject. In one chapter I would tell the employer things his workman wants him to know, and in the next chapter I would tell the workman things that for years the employer has been trying to get him to notice. I would begin each chapter in such a way that no employer or workman would ever know which was which, or which was his chapter, until he had got in quite a little way; and I would do my best to have everybody read each other's chapters all through the book. An employer would be reading along in his chapter as innocent as you please, and slap his leg and say, "THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT! It does me good to think my workmen are reading this!" And then he would turn over the leaf and he would come plump full head on into three paragraphs about himself and about how the public feels about him, and about how his workmen feel about him, and about what God is going to do to him, and about what all the people who read my book are going to help God to do to him, that will make him think. The first thing he will think of perhaps will be to lay down the book. Then before he knows it he will see another of those things he wants his workmen to read softly poking itself out of the page at him. Then he will slap his leg and think how I am making his workmen think. So he will go through the book slapping his leg and shouting "Amen" in one chapter, and sitting still and thinking in the next.
This is the gist of what I propose a new organization shall do on a national scale.
It may seem a rather simple-minded way to describe what I propose a great aggregation of American men and women on the scale of the Red Cross, should do, but the soul, the spirit, the temperament, even the technique of what I have in mind—in miniature, is in it.
It is true that it would be a certain satisfaction of course to an author to prove to employers and employees that they could get on better together than they could apart, even if they got on together better only in a kind of secret and private way in the pages of his own book; and it is true that a book in which I could make an employer and an employee work their minds together through my own little fountain pen would count some. I would at least be dramatizing my idea in ink.
But people do not believe ideas dramatized in ink.
The thing for an author or a man who has ideas to do if he must use words, is to use words to make his ideas happen.
Then let him use words about them and write books about them to advertise that they have happened.
People are more impressed with things that have happened than they are with things that are perhaps going to. Instead of having employers and employees go over the same ideas together in a book, I propose that twenty million people, in ten thousand cities shall make them go over the same ideas together in the shop.
Are capital and labor going to use the holdup on each other to get what they want when six million dead men, still almost warm in their graves, have died to prove that the holdup, or German way of getting things, does not work? What the new League will be for will be to put before the world, before every nation, before every village and city in its local branch, a working vision of how different classes and different groups of people can get what they want out of each other by trying things out together, by touching each other's imaginations and advertising to each other instead of blowing out each other's brains. The way to keep in place our Bolshevists of America is to show them that we the combined people of America, combined and acting together as one in the organization I am sketching in this book, know what they want, and that we can get the thing they essentially want for them better than they can get it. The three great groups in American life—the employing class, the laboring class, and the consumer—have all belonged to the Red Cross together, they have all worked together and sacrificed themselves, and sacrificed their class, to work for the Red Cross. What the New League will stand for in the name of all of them will be the thing that they have already demonstrated in the Red Cross that they can do. Three classes can get a thing for one class better than one class can get it.
This is the content of the League's vision of action.
The method of it will be advertising with enormous campaigns never dreamed of before what the three-class vision is and how it works. Then we will have factories dramatize it. Then we will advertise the factories.
Then when we have democracy working in a thousand factories, we will advertise and transplant our working democracy, our factory democracies, abroad.
People who have learned that democracy works in their daily work can be trusted to believe democracy will work even in their religion, even in their politics.
The idea I have in mind is already foreshadowed in the city of Cleveland.
The spirit of the people of Cleveland has already rebelled against being treated as a ghost—against being whoofed at by Labor unions and trusts.
Always before this, when incompetent manufacturers and incompetent labor unions, for the mere reason that they had not the patience to try very hard and were incompetent to understand one another and do their job, held up the whole city—five hundred thousand people—and calmly made them pay for it, the city of Cleveland like any other city would venture to step in sweetly and kindly, look spiritual and intangible a minute, suggest wistfully that they did feel capital and labor were not being quite fair to Cleveland and would they not please stop interrupting Cleveland several million dollars a day. All that ever would come of it would be the yowls of Labor at the Ghost of Cleveland, the noble whines of manufacturers at the Ghost of Cleveland.
Cleveland was treated as if it was not there.
Cleveland now swears off from being a ghost and proposes to deal bodily and in behalf of all, with its own lockouts and its own strikes in much the same way I am hoping the nation will, according to the news in my paper this morning.
With Mr. Paul Pfeiss, an eminently competent manufacturer, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as partly responsible for the holdups practiced on the city and with Mr. Warren S. Stone, an eminently competent labor union leader, recognizing the incompetence of his own group as being also partly responsible—with these two men, one the official representative of the Capital group, and the other the official representative of the Labor group, both championing the Public group and standing out for Cleveland against themselves, taking the initiative and acting respectively as President and Secretary of the Public group, the Ghost of the city of Cleveland publicly swears off from being a ghost and begins precipitating a body for itself.
I do not wish to hamper my own statement of my idea of a body for the people of the United States by linking it up with a definite undertaking in Cleveland which may or may not prove to be as good an illustration of it as I hope, but the spirit and the understanding of what has got to happen, seems to be in Cleveland—and I stop in the middle of my chapter with greetings to Paul Pfeiss and to Warren Stone. In my book the Ghost of the People of Cleveland salutes the Ghost of the People of the United States!
VII
THE GHOST GETS DOWN TO BUSINESS
A body usually begins with an embryo, and the tissue and skeleton come afterwards.
A book does, too. I prefer not exposing a skeleton much, myself, and am inclined to feel that the ground plan of a book like the ground plan of a man, should be illustrated and used, should be presented to people with the flesh on, that a skeleton should be treated politely as an inference.
But I am dealing with the body of democracy. And people are nervous about democracy just now, so much boneless democracy is being offered to them.
So I begin with the principles—the skeleton of the body of democracy for which this book stands.
The outstanding features of the body of democracy are the brain, the heart and the hand.
With the brain of democracy goes the right to think.
With the heart goes the right to live.
With the hand goes the right to be waited on.
With these three rights go three greater rights, or three duties, some people call them.
With the right to think goes the right to let others think.
With the right to live goes the right to let others live.
With the right to be waited on, goes the right to serve. To call the right to serve a duty is an understatement. I doubt if the people who have succeeded best and who have really attained the largest amount of their three greater rights, have thought of them very often as duties.
I end this chapter with the three questions America is in the world to-day to ask, to find out her own personal three answers to in the sight of the nations.
I am putting with the three questions the three answers I am hoping to hear my country give, before I die.
What determines what proportion of his right to think, each man shall have?
His power to get attention and let others think.
What determines what proportion of his right to live, each man shall have?
His power to let others live.
What determines what proportion of his right to be waited on, each man shall have?
His power to serve.
These are the principles of the new League—the voluntary, spontaneous organization of the men and women of America to meet the emergency in America of our war with ourselves, on the same scale and in the same spirit as the Red Cross met the emergency of our war with other nations, an organization which I hope to show ought to be formed, and which I am rising to make the motion to form, in this book.
I put these principles forward as the by-laws of America's faith in itself, as the principles that should govern the brain, the heart and the hand of each man in a democracy, toward all other men and that should govern all other men toward him—the skeleton of the body of the people.
VIII
THREE RIGHTS OF MAN IN A DEMOCRACY
I—THE RIGHT TO THINK
I am entitled to one one-hundred millionth of President Wilson's time in a year.
1/100,000,000th.
If I want 2/100,000,000ths of President Wilson's time in a year I must show him why. I must also show the other 99,999,999 people who think I deserve no more than my regular 1/100,000,000th why I should have two. Not allowing for the President's sleeping nights, my precise share of his time would be one-third of a second once a year. Why should I have two-thirds of a second?
I have to show.
The success of democracy as a working institution turns on salesmanship—upon every man's selling himself—his right to the attention of the Government.
A democracy which considers itself a queue of a hundred million people standing before the window of the President's attention to be waited upon by the President in the order in which they are born or in which they come up, would be a helpless institution. The success of democracy—that is, the success of a government in serving the will of the hundred million people in the queue, turns on sorting people in the queue out, turns on giving attention to what some people in the queue want before others. The man who gets out of line and walks up ahead of people who have been standing in line longer than he has, must get the permission of the queue. He must make the people in the queue feel he represents them with the President if he steps up ahead. Then they let him have their turn. They are glad to let him have hours with the President if they feel he is giving hours' worth of representation to their minutes. All each man wants to feel is that in letting Gompers, for instance, or Schwab, go up ahead, he is getting with the President a minute an hour long. Miles of people in rows say to a man like this, who can give them and their interests with the President a minute an hour long, "You first, please."
Political democracy, if it works, turns on getting the attention of the queue and then going with it to the window.
Political democracy, in other words, turns on advertising.
So does industrial democracy.
Industrial democracy in a factory of five thousand men consists in making arrangements for the five thousand men to appreciate each other, appreciate the Firm, and to feel the Firm appreciating them; arrangements for having the five thousand men get each other's attention in the right proportions at the right time so that they work as one.
The next thing that is coming in industrial democracy is getting skilled capital and skilled labor to appreciate each other's skill. A skilled capitalist can not fairly be called a skilled capitalist or, now that this war is over, unless he knows how to keep his queue appreciating his skill, keep his five thousand men standing in line for his attention cheerfully.
The difference between an industrial autocracy and an industrial democracy is that in an industrial autocracy you keep your queue in line with a club, or with threats of bread and butter, and in an industrial democracy you have your queue of five thousand men, each man in the row cheering you while he sees you giving one minute a week of your attention to him and one hour a day of your attention to others. Still you find him cheering you.
The skilled employer is the employer who so successfully advertises his skill to his employees and so successfully advertises their skill to themselves and to one another that they hand over to him in their common interest the right to sort them over. They hand over to him deliberately, in other words, in their own interests, the right not to treat them alike. Democracy consists in keeping people in line without a club. Democracy is a queueful of people cutting in ahead of one another fairly and in a way that the queue stands for.
If a man standing in a queue before a ticket window wants to cut in ahead of five people, the way for him to do it is to show the five people something in his hand that makes them say, "You first, please." He must show why he should go first, and that he is doing it in their interest.
The other day as I was standing in a long line of people before the ticket window in the Northampton station, I noticed on a guess that half a dozen of the people were standing in line to buy a ticket to New York on the express due in half an hour, and a dozen and a half were standing in line to buy tickets to Springfield on the local going in three minutes. I was number thirteen. I wanted to get a ticket for Springfield. The thing for me to do, of course, to rise to the crisis and make democracy work, was to jump up on my suitcase and address the queue who were ahead of me: "Ladies and gentlemen! Eighteen or twenty of you in this line ahead of me want tickets to Springfield on the train going in three minutes, and the rest of you want tickets on the train going in half an hour. If you people who are hoping you can get your tickets in time to go to Springfield will let me cut in ahead of you out of my turn and get my ticket, I will buy tickets for all of you with this ten dollar bill in thirty seconds, and you can get your tickets of me on the train, and in this way we will all catch it."
I did not do it, of course, but it would have been what I call democracy if I had.
The whole problem of labor and capital, and of political and industrial freedom, from now on after this war would have been solved in miniature before that window—if I had. My invention for the future of the Red Cross is that it should do what I tried to do at that window, for the American people.
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are essentially autocrats. The difference between an autocracy and a democracy is that the people select their autocrats. The more autocracy the more efficiency.
A people can not have the autocracy they need to get what they want unless they are willing to give over to their representatives the necessary trust pro tem., the necessary ex officio right to be autocrats in their behalf. Democracy is autocracy of the people, for the people, by the people—that is, by the people in spirit to their representatives who express their spirit.
The representatives of the people can not keep the people's autocracy for them unless they keep in touch with the people—that is, unless they advertise to the people and the people feel that they can advertise to them.
In an autocracy the autocracy of the ruler is based on forcing people's attention. In a democracy the autocracy is based on touching men's imaginations, on making people want to fall into line in the right order. If the Kaiser had done this in Germany, Germany would have been the greatest democracy in the world and the greatest nation. If the Kaiser had had the power and genius for advertising of the modern kind, if he had had the power of making people want things in distinction from making them meek and making them take them whether they wanted them or not, he would have invented and set up a working model for America.
Obviously, the more the people desire to form in line the better and more successful all the people in the line will be in getting what they want at the window. The more autocracy people know enough to give their representatives, the better democracy works. In the last analysis the fate of democracy in modern life turns on having autocrats on probation—autocrats selected for their positions by advertising, and kept in position as autocrats as long as they can advertise to the people and as long as the people feel that they can advertise to them.
IX
II—THE RIGHT TO BE WAITED ON
Democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in the way kings are, and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
Three Rights to Be Waited on
1. Skilled labor has the right to be waited on by skilled capital.
Skilled labor, being preoccupied as it naturally is by its highly specialized knowledge and skill, can not take the time off to do for itself what skilled capital could do in providing work, and providing markets for skilled labor. It cannot, on the other hand, take the time off to understand skilled capital and what it is doing in detail. Even if it could take the time off, and if five thousand hands in a factory all devoted themselves all day to understanding the work the Office is doing, the five thousand would make poor work of understanding.
Arrangements have got to be made in one way or another for skilled labor's trusting the Office, for its feeling that the autocracy it intrusts to the Office is being used fairly in its interest.
The first and most important skill of skilled capital, of course, is its skill in doing for its employees and for its customers what it is supposed to do.
But the second skill of capital must be skill in being believed in and finding means of being believed in by its employees. The more it is believed in, the more power to serve will be accorded to it. In other words, the second function of skilled capital is advertising to its skilled labor, and in making exchange arrangements with its skilled labor, for being advertised to.
2. Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled labor.
The first skill of skilled labor must be with its machines and its tools, and in making its product, but the second skill must be its skill in being believed in. The skilled capital it is supposed to be waited on by is preoccupied with its skill, and unless labor makes special and very thorough provision to be understood and to keep understood by skilled capital, and by the public and the people who buy the goods, and unless skilled labor tries to keep in touch all around and do teamwork all around with all concerned so that it can do its work, it can not fairly be called skilled labor at all. Skilled labor has to have skill in putting its skill with others to produce a result.
In other words, the second skill of skilled labor is skill in making arrangements for being believed in and believing in others. Its second skill is in advertising and in being advertised to.
3. The other group concerned in industry is one which I like to call the Skilled Consumers.
The people have a right to have capital skilled in considering them, and labor skilled in considering them, at every point.
The people are the employers of all employers and of all employees.
The saying among business men and merchants in case of quarrel, "The customer is always right," has to be in the long run treated in a democracy as if it were approximately true.
What the consumers have to do in a democracy, however, in a singular degree is to live up to it. The consumers must make, and I believe are going to make, elaborate arrangements for being skilled consumers.
Skilled capital has organized.
Skilled labor has organized.
And now the consumers, or the people, if they are to be skilled, and if they are to get out of skilled capital and skilled labor what they want, will organize their skill to get it. They will organize to help the best skilled capital at the expense of the worst, to help the best skilled labor at the expense of the worst.
In other words, the secret of industrial democracy and of making industrial democracy work, lies in making the people skilled in conveying their wishes to the skilled capital and skilled labor waiting on them.
Skilled capital has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will support it when it is right and punish it when it is wrong, by the way they buy and sell.
Skilled labor has a right to be waited on by skilled consumers, who will defend it from skilled capital that pretends to be skilled and is not.
True and sincere skilled capital and true and sincere skilled labor cannot keep on doing what they try to do as long as the supposedly skilled consumers they have a right to, back away from their job and lazily and foolishly buy and sell in the markets in such a way as to reward capital for doing wrong to labor, or labor for doing wrong to capital.
In other words, the second function of the skilled consumers after telling skilled capital and labor what they want to eat and wear, is to make arrangements to advertise to capital and labor and to have capital and labor advertise to them, so that they can be skilled in knowing how to help them work together, and skilled in buying in such a way as to help in making capital and labor more skilled instead of less in dealing with themselves and one another and with the people.
I have summed up the three Rights to Be Waited On. All of these rights turn on skilled advertising and on the science of being believed in, the science of being allowed to be autocrats, the science of being allowed by the people to make their democracy work.
I would like to illustrate this in the next chapter.
X
III—THE RIGHT TO WHISPER
The employees in the stockyards in —— have been trying to get the attention of Mr. John Doe, the young man who inherited the business, to the fact that the least a family can live on now is $1388 a year.
Mr. Doe, who has never tried being bitterly poor and whose attention can not be got to what can be done in a year for a wife and five children with $1388 until he tries it, is rather discouraging to deal with.
There is no known way of getting him to try it, and in the meantime he thinks he knows without trying, and he thinks his attention is got when it is not. He tells the workmen that two pairs of shoes ought to last a child a year—and goes home in his limousine.
That is the end of it.
It ought not to be the end of it.
Who can get Mr. Doe's attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees do not succeed in getting Mr. Doe's attention?
Why is it that Mr. Doe has so little difficulty in getting theirs? Why is it that Mr. Doe's employees, when he speaks of the two pairs of shoes a year, hang on his words?
Because Mr. John Doe is their employer.
Who are the people whose words Mr. Doe would hang on and would be obliged to hang on?
Mr. Doe's employers.
Who are Mr. Doe's employers?
All the people in America who eat meat.
Of course if one had just come from Mars yesterday and was looking about studying things, the first thing one would ask would be, Why do not the people in America who eat meat, and who keep on Mr. Doe in his position, at once mention to him that they wish him to look into the matter of the two pairs of shoes a year?
Because the People Who Eat Meat—Mr. Doe's employers—have no way of mentioning it to Mr. Doe.
If the People Who Eat Meat would but barely whisper to Mr. Doe it would get his attention as much as a whole year's shouting would from his workmen.
But the People Who Eat Meat in America have no whisper. In other words, it is because Mr. Doe's employers are absolutely dumb, and Mr. Doe is absolutely deaf to any one except his employers, that two pairs of shoes are not enough for the workmen's children.
It is for the purpose of letting the People Who Eat Meat in America—whisper and learn to whisper in this country that the new League organized to operate as a kind of People's Advertising Guild or Consumers' Advertising Club, with its national office in New York and its local branches in ten thousand towns and cities, now offers its services to all people who eat meat in America.
The employers of America have organized to do anything with their business, and anything with their workmen, and anything with the country that they like.
The workmen of America have organized to do now, and are deliberately planning to do anything with their work, and anything with their employers, and anything with the country that they like.
The new national League is now to be organized as the voice of the American people, as the whisper of the will of the consumer in every industry in America.
The people to get the attention of employers are the employers of the employers.
Every civil war we are having in this country can be settled and the attention of the fighters on both sides can be got, and the country can work as one man in making democracy safe for the world, the moment the employers of the employers whisper.
The way I would like to end this chapter—with the blanks filled in, of course, would be this.
Anybody who wants to be a part of this whisper, who knows of any industry he would like to see a whisper from the people tried in, or who wishes as an Associate Member to join the Air Line League—a League for the direct action of the people in what concerns them all, is invited to send five dollars as membership fee and his name and address, to ——, Treasurer National Office of The Air Line League, Number —— Street, New York.
But the chapter cannot end in this way.
This is merely the pattern of the way I would like to have it end later, and while I have put the name—The Air Line League—down and am going to use it for the convenience of this book, I only do so, leaving it open to the people who have the vision of The League and who put the vision into action, to change the name if they want to.
XI
THE RIGHT TO WHISPER TOGETHER
Every man like all Gaul is divided into three parts. He is an employee of somebody, an employer of somebody, and a consumer.
The natural employer left to himself is apt to suppose, if he is making shoes, that his consumers ought to pay more for shoes, and that his employees ought to be paid less. As regards hats, and umbrellas, and overcoats, and underwear, the same man is a rather noble impartial person towards employers and employees. He wants them to listen to each other and lower the cost of living by not having strikes and lockouts, and by not fighting each other ten hours a day.
In 999 out of 1000 labor quarrels a consumer is naturally a fair-minded person and the best-located person to control and determine how any particular business shall be run.
The League proposed is planned to operate in its national and local functions as a national Consumers' Club, with working branches in every town which shall be engaged in doing specific things every day toward making the employers and employees in that town listen to each other in the interests of the consumer public.
It is always to the interests of the consumer-public to see to it that people who have particular interests in a business should be compelled to listen to the others' interests.
Consumers naturally prefer experts to run things for them, but if they do not run them for them, they are the natural people to make them do it.
In the last resort the right to control is with the consumers.
We are going to look to them very soon now as the natural Central Telephone Exchange in business. It is the consumers who connect everybody up. They are the switchboard of the World.
XII
THE RIGHT TO TRUST SOMEBODY
Democracy—as perhaps my reader will have heard me say before—democracy is a form of government in which the people are supposed to be waited on in just the way kings are and in which the people arrange to have things done for them so that they won't have to hold up their work and take the time off to do them themselves.
I try to go to the polls as I should. But I resent being obliged by my dear native country to stand up in a booth by myself with a lead pencil and know all there is to know and in a few minutes, about seventy-five men on a ticket. I do not like to feel that I am swaying the world with that yellow pencil, and that the ignorant way I feel when I am putting down crosses beside names, is the feeling other people have, that this feeling I have—in those few brief miserable moments I spend with the yellow pencil—is the feeling that this country is being governed with.
I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country—he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.
As a democrat and as a believer in crowds I resent the idea that being stood up and being made to vote on seventy-five names I cannot know anything about is democracy. It is tyranny. It is a demand that I do something no one has a right to make me do. I have other things every man knows I can do better and so has the man in the booth next to me, than knowing all there is to know about seventy-five names on a ticket—Smiths and Browns and Smiths and Smiths—it is a thing I want to have done for me, I want experts—engineers in human nature that I and my fellow citizens can hire to pick out my employees,i.e., the employees of the state that I want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives toward so many people.
We don't want to stop doing things we know we know, and know we can do, to vote on expert questions we don't even want to know anything about, huge laundry-lists of people that God only knows or could know and that can only be seen through anyway by large faithful hard-working committees who devote their time to it.
If we spent nine hours a day in doing nothing else but reading papers and watching and going up and down our laundry-list of valuable persons day and night we couldn't keep track or begin to keep track of the people we put in office. It is not our business to, it seems to many of us. Perhaps I should merely speak for myself. I can at least be permitted to say that it is not my business. If the state will give me ten men to watch, men in prominent places where they can be watched more or less naturally and easily, I will undertake to help watch them and then vote on them. What I demand and have a right to as a democrat and as a man who wants to get things for the people is that these ten men shall look after the other sixty-five and let me attend to business. The other sixty-five have a right to be looked after, criticized and appreciated by people who can do it, by men who can devote themselves to it, by men we all elect intelligently to do it for us—by men we have all looked through and through and trust.
The last year or so I have been getting about three long communications a week from the —— Railway which has been trying to make me over into an expert on all the details of its relation to the Government. I wish I had time to know all about it. Some of us will have to. Things are so arranged just now in this country that probably if a lot of us whose business it is to travel on the railroads instead of running them don't take a hand at it for a while and butt in in behalf of both the railroads and the Government, there won't be any railroads or there won't be any Government.
But I resent having this crisis put up to me personally. I resent having a pile a foot high of things I have got to know before I can help the Government to be fair to the railroads—or the railroads to be fair to the Government. I am better anyway at writing books. I don't want to be jerked into a judge—or a corporation lawyer because I am a voter. Railroads always bewilder me. Even the simplest things railroads tell everybody about themselves are hard for me to understand—time-tables for instance; and why should a man who is always innocently taking Sunday trains on Monday afternoon be called on to butt in on an expert auditor's job in this way, beat his Congressman on the head with the poor penitent railroads—with all the details about their poor insides—and with all their back bills and things?
There must be other voters who feel about this as I do.
Is this Democracy?
This is what Democracy is to me—Democracy is a belief in the faithfulness, ability and shrewd good-heartedness of crowds and their power to select great and true leaders.
The essential fundamental principle of the democratic form of government is supposed to be that more than any other form of government on the face of the earth it trusts people. A democracy that does not trust its leaders, that does not trust even its best men, is not as democratic as a monarchy that does. Some of us seem to think that all that people can be trusted to do is to pick out men we can keep from leading us, that it's a kind of religion to us to select men we can stop and bother. They have settled down to the idea that this is what we are like—as if the main qualification of a candidate in America is a gift of making people, of making in fact almost anybody, feel superior to him. I believe I am living in a democracy that will dare to elect experts in subjects, that will take being a statesman seriously—as a special and skilled profession, an expert engineering job in human nature, and in getting things out of people, and for people. We are getting ready for great and true leaders in America. Our people are getting ready to stake their fate in picking them out. Even our banks are. Our labor unions are. In our politics it is the masterful servants we are taking to most. Anybody can see it. There are particular things and men we want, and the first leader we have in this country who is shrewd enough about us to see that we, the people of this country, are not as vague or cartilaginous as we look, who treats us like fellow human beings, who dares to expect things of us and dares to expect to be trusted by us and who dares to keep still long enough to do things for us, will show what America is like, in spite of what she looks like, and will bring America out.
And America instead of being a kind of big slovenly adolescent, perpetually thirteen-year-old nation going around with its big innocent mouth open, will be grown up at last among the nations of the earth, will be a great clear-cut, clear-headed, firm-knit, sinewy nation that knows what it wants, and gets it—and does not say much.
XIII
THE RIGHT TO VOTE ALL DAY
This principle which I have applied in this last chapter to political democracy applies still more forcibly to democracy in industry, and to the right of the people to be waited on by skilled labor and by skilled capital.
I do not wish to bother to know everything about how everything I buy every day is made, but I do want to have arrangements made through a national league to which I belong, for instance, so that I can practically know about the conditions under which anything is made, the moment I wish to.
There should be as it were a card catalogue or authority in my town that I can go to and consult, which represents me and a hundred million people. This is my conception of what the National League through its local branches could do and do for everybody. It would only cost a few cents more to have a hundred million men know about a particular article what ten, twenty or a hundred or a thousand know, the moment they happen to need it, by looking it up in the League's national opinion of it and national experience with it, in a card catalogue or what would operate practically as a card catalogue.
We all have the right in this country to spend our money intelligently. If people want to get our thousand dollars a year, or two thousand a year, or three, five, or ten thousand a year, they must show cause why they should have it, dollar for dollar. We want our dollars to help people to help us, laborers who are helping the country and capitalists who are helping the country. Every time I spend ten cents I want to know that I am getting ten cents' worth of democracy, ten cents' worth of skilled capital and skilled labor working for all of us. I propose to vote with my money on the fate of my country and the fate of democracy with silver coins and with dollar bills every day. The other kind of ballot, the paper ballot, I can only use in the nature of the case once or twice a year.