Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
It was because Christ, Savonarola, and John Bunyan were all trying to
save themselves that it ever so much as occurred to them to save worlds.
Saving a world was the only way to do it.
The Cross was Christ's final stand for his own companionableness, his
stand for being like other people, for having other people to share his
life with, his faith in others and his joy in the world.
The world was saved incidentally when Christ died on the Cross. He
wanted to live more abundantly--and he had to have certain sorts of
people to live more abundantly with. He did not want to live unless he
could live more abundantly.
We live in a world in which inventors want to die if they cannot invent
and in which Hewers want to die if they cannot hew.
I am not proud. I am willing to be saved. Any saviour may save me if he
wants to, if his saving me is a part of his saving himself.
If the inventor saves me and saves us all because he wants to be in a
world where an inventor can invent, wants some one to invent to; if the
artist saves me because it is part of his worship of God to have me
saved and wants to use me every day to rejoice about the world with--if
the Hewer comes over and hews out a place in the world for me because he
wants to hew, I am willing.
All that I demand is, that if a man take the liberty of being a saviour
to me that he refrain from stooping, that he come up to me and save me
like a man, that he stand before me and tell me that here is something
that we, he and I, shoulder to shoulder, can do, something that neither
of us could do alone. Then he will fall to with me and I will fall to
with him, and we will do it.
This is what I mean by a saviour.
CHAPTER XX
THE STRIKE OF THE SAVIOURS
A factory in ---- some ten years ago employed one hundred men. Three of
these men were in the office and ninety-seven were hands in the works.
To-day this same factory which is doing a very much larger business is
still employing one hundred men, but thirty of the men are employed in
the office and seventy in the works.
Ten years, ago to put it in other words, the factory provided places for
one artist or manager and two inventors and places for ninety-seven
Hewers.
To-day the factory has made room for thirty inventors, one manager and
twenty-nine men who spend their entire time in thinking of things that
will help the Hewers hew.
It has seventy Hewers who are helping the Inventors invent by hewing
three times as hard and three times as skilfully or three times as much
as without the Inventors to help them, they had dreamed they could hew
before.
The Artist or Organizer who made this change in the factory found that
among the ninety-seven Hewers that were employed a number of Hewers were
hewing very poorly, because though hewing was the best they could do,
they could not even hew. He found certain others who were hewing poorly
because they were not Hewers, but Inventors. These he set to work--some
of them inventing in the office.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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