Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
Perhaps if he concentrated his imagination as much on getting higher
wages for his workmen as he had in those early days years before on
making over all his obstinate raw material into the best cases of ----
on earth, he might find it possible to get more wages for his men by
persuading them to earn more and by getting their cooeperation in finding
ways to earn more.
As he sat in the stillness, gradually (perhaps it was the stillness that
did it) the idea grew on him.
He made up his mind to see what would happen if he worked as hard at
paying higher wages for three months as he had for three years at making
raw material into cases of the best----on earth.
Then things began happening every day. One of the most important
happened to him.
He found that higher wages were as interesting a thing to work on as any
other raw material had ever been.
He found that a cheap workman as raw material to make a high-priced
workman out of was as interesting as a case of----.
A year or so after this, there was a strike (in his particular industry)
of all the workmen in England. They struck to be paid the wages his men
were paid.
He had been able to do three things he thought he thought he could not
do. He had succeeded in doing the first, in raising the wages of his
employees, by thinking up original ways of expressing himself to them,
and of getting them to believe in him and of making them want to work a
third harder. At the same time he succeeded in doing the second, in
reducing the prices to consumers, by inventing new by-products out of
waste.
He had succeeded in doing the third, in reducing his per cent. of
profits and increasing his income from the works at the same time, by
thinking up ways of creating new habits and new needs in his customers.
He had fulfilled, as it seems, the three requisites of a great business
career. He had created new workmen, invented new things for men and
women to want, and had then created some new men and women who could
want them.
Incidentally all the while, day by day, while he was doing these things,
he had distributed a large and more or less unexpected sum of money
among all these three classes of people.
Some of this extra money went to his workmen, and some to himself, and
some to his customers, but it was largely spent, of course, in getting
business for other manufacturers and in getting people to buy all over
England, from other manufacturers, things that such people as they had
never been able before to afford to buy.
* * * * *
All these things that I have been saying and which I have duly confided
to the reader flashed through my mind as I stood with my back to the
fire, realizing suddenly that the man who had done them was the man with
whom I was talking.
Possibly some little thing was said. I do not remember what. The next
thing I knew was that, with his five grown sons around him, he returned
to his attack on his house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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