Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
But if Christ returned to the world to-morrow and if what He wanted to
do to-morrow was to get the universal, profound, convinced attention of
all men to the Golden Rule, I believe He would begin the way Frederick
Taylor did, by--being concrete. If He wanted to get men in general, men
in business, to love one another He would begin by trying to work out
some technical, practical way in which certain particular men in a
certain particular place could afford to love one another.
He would find a practical way for instance for the employers and
pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works to come to some sort of
common understanding and to work cheerfully and with a free spirit
together. I think he would proceed very much in the way that Frederick
Taylor did.
He would not say much about the Golden Rule. He would give each man a
vision for his work, and of the way it lapped over into other men's work
and leave the Golden Rule a chance to take care of itself. This is all
the Golden Rule, as a truth or as a remark needs just now.
For two thousand years men have devoted themselves Sunday day after
Sunday to saying over and over again that men should love one another.
The idea is a perfectly familiar one. When Christ said it two thousand
years ago, it was so original and so sensational that just of itself and
as a mere remark it had a carrying power over the whole earth.
Everybody believes it now--that it is a true remark--but like a score of
other remarks that have been made and some of the noblest Christ made,
is it not possible that it has long since in its mere capacity of being
a remark, gone by? There is no one who has not heard about our loving
one another. The remark we want now is how we can do it. This is the
remark that Mr. Frederick Taylor has made. It is not very eloquent. It
is a mere statement of fact. It has taken him nearly thirty-three years
to make it.
The gist of it is that for thirty-three years, the employers and the
pig-iron handlers in the Midvale Steel Works, Pennsylvania, have been
devoted to one another and to one another's interests and acting all day
every day as if of course their interests were the same, and it has been
found that employees when their employers cooeperated with them could
lift forty-seven tons instead of twelve and a half a day, and were
getting 60 per cent. more wages.
Everybody listens. Everybody sees at a glance that when it comes to
making remarks about doing as one would be done by, this is the one
remark that we have all been waiting to hear some one make for two
thousand years.
* * * * *
The Cross or the last-resort type of religion was as far as St.
Augustine or St. Francis in their world could get. It was all that the
Middle Ages were ready for or that could be claimed for people who had
to live in ages without a printing press, in which no one in the crowd
could expect to know anything and in which there were no ways of letting
crowds know things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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