If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit, and how is he going to do it? Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of against them, they would do it. What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in him and understand him? The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes out, and asking him--now with despair, now with a kind of grim, implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can be made as human as a department store?" This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work--who know what people-machines really are, and what they are really for, and how they work. They will base all that they do upon certain resemblances and certain differences between people and machines. They will work the machines of iron according to the laws of iron. They will work the machines of men according to the laws of human nature. There are certain facts in human nature, feelings, enthusiasms and general principles concerning the natural working relation between men and machines, that it may be well to consider in the next chapter as a basis for a possible solution. What are our machines after all? How are the machines like us? And on what theory of their relation to us can machines and men expect in a world like this to run softly together? These are the questions men are going to answer next. In the meantime, I venture to believe that no man who is morose to-day about the machines, or who is afraid of machines in our civilization--because they are machines--is likely to be able to do much to save the men in it. CHAPTER VIII THE BASEMENT OF THE WORLD Every man has, according to the scientists, a place in the small of his back which might be called roughly, perhaps, the soul of his body. All the little streets of the senses or avenues of knowledge, the spiritual conduits through which he lives in this world, meet in this little mighty brain in the small of a man's back. About nine hundred millions of his grandfathers apparently make their headquarters in this little place in the small of his back.