Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
He said some days he was glad it was so far away. He did not want his
workmen to see it. He did not go to the mill often in his motor-car, not
when he could help it.
I said that I thought that a man who was doing extraordinary things for
other people, things that other men could not get time or strength or
freedom or boldness of mind or initiative to do, that any particular
thing he could have that gave him any advantage or immunity for doing
the extraordinary things better, that would give him more of a chance to
give other people a chance, that the other people, if they were in their
senses, would insist upon his having these things.
"I think there are hundreds of men in my mill who think that they ought
to have my motor-car and three or four rooms in this house."
"Are they the most efficient ones?"
"No."
If a man gives over to other people his deepest motives, and if he
really identifies himself--the very inside of himself with them and
treats their interests as his interests, the more money he has, the more
people like it.
"Take me, for instance," I said.
"I have hoped every minute since I knew you, that you were a prosperous
man. I saw the house and looked around in the park as I motored up with
joy. And when I came to the big gate I wanted to give three cheers! I
wish you had stock in the Meat Trust in America, that you could pierce
your way like a microbe into the vitals, into the inside of the Meat
Trust in my own country, make a stand in a Directors' Meeting for ninety
million people over there, say your say for them, vote your stock for
them, say how you want a Meat Trust you belong to, to behave, how you
want it to be a big, serious, business institution and not a humdrum,
mechanical-minded hold-up anybody could think of--in charge of a few
uninteresting, inglorious men--men nobody really cares to know and that
nobody wants to be like ... when I think of what a man like you with
money can do ...!
"Am I not tired every day, are you not tired, yourself, of going about
everywhere and seeing money in the hands of all these second-class,
socially feeble-minded men, of seeing columns in the papers of what such
men think, of having college presidents, great universities, domes,
churches and thousands of steeples all deferring to them and bowing to
them, and all the superior, live, interested people ringing their door
bells for their money waiting outside on benches for what they think?"
I do not believe that Christ came into the world, two thousand years
ago, to say that only the men who have minds of the second class, men
who are not far-sighted enough in business to be decently unselfish in
this world, should be allowed to have control of the money and of the
peoples' means of living in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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