Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The next thing Society is going to do, perhaps, is to design and set up
purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires.
The moment our millionaires have placed before them something to live
for, a few real, live, satisfying ideals, or splendid lasting things
they can do, things that everybody else would want to do, and that
everybody else would envy them for doing, it will bore them to run a
great business merely to make money. They will find it more interesting,
harder, and calling for greater genius, to be great and capable
employers. When our millionaires once begin to enter into competition
with one another in being the greatest and most successful employers of
labour on earth, our industrial wars will cease.
Millionaires who get as much work out of their employees as they dare,
and pay them as little as they can, and who give the public as small
values as they dare, and take as much money as they can, only do such
stupid, humdrum, conventional things because they are bored, because
they cannot really think of anything to live for.
Labourers whose daily, hourly occupation consists in seeing how much
less work a day than they ought to do, they can do, and how much more
money they can get out of their employers than they earn, only do such
things because they are tired or bored and discouraged, and because they
cannot think of anything that is truly big and fine and worth working
for.
The industrial question is not an economic question. It is a question of
supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American
National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first
moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and
for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the
world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.
* * * * *
As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing
house--marking off rooms--sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of
stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big
stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on
it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up
a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought
would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for
them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that
night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had
given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone
for yards around--every one that was the right size--seemed subtly out
of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.
They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.
I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys'
first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off
for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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