The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
John Stuart Mill · en
They have to be educated in public. He is not insincere because he has
not educated them all in a minute.
V
GETTING ONE MAN RIGHT
There are certain facts which make me believe in Schwab as an asset for
the nation and for labor and capital both, that must not be thrown away.
There are all manner of facts about Schwab and his mills which I do not
yet know which I could look up and use, but the most valuable facts to
use and use first, are facts anybody can get and get without looking up,
by just sitting down and thinking.
Getting one man right and being fair to one man is the way to begin to be
fair to a nation.
If Charles Schwab is what ---- says he is, if Charles Schwab is doing or
winking while it is being done at the thing ---- says he is--he is an
incredibly under-witted man--stupid about the public, about labor and
about capital--and, what is the most reckless of all--stupid in behalf of
himself.
It is rather a hard nut to crack--Charles Schwab's being stupid. I cannot
understand why people--why a man like ---- would apparently rather
believe that Charles Schwab is stupid than to believe that there must be
some other way of explaining him and of explaining what he has heard said
about him.
If what ---- says is true about Mr. Schwab, he is not only a stupid man
but a ruined man.
In the colossal outbreak of public knowledge coming to us now, nothing
will be able to keep Charles Schwab from to-morrow on, from being a
stupendous tragedy as long as he lives, and a by-word after he is dead.
The alternatives are:
The assertions about Mr. Schwab's real attitude toward labor are not
true.
If true, they are qualified by facts and by delaying conditions for which
all intelligent men whether identified with capital or labor would be
glad to allow.
If true they are due to delegated authority.
If a large organization does not hand over authority it is inefficient.
If it does not make experiments with men and methods it is inefficient.
If it does not make a certain proportion of mistakes in its experiments
with men and methods its experiments are fake experiments.
People who do things soon stop being harsh in judging people who do
things.
VI
GETTING FIFTY MEN RIGHT
My experience is that extreme reactionaries and extreme radicals and
reformers are the same kind of people turned around. Take any extreme
radical and begin operating him other end to, and you have an extreme
conservative. In the one thing that determines what a man amounts to and
what a man does, viz.: his intuition and judgment with regard to human
nature, extreme conservatives and extreme reformers are a marked people
and make and have the habit of making singularly stupid, harsh and
self-mutilating judgments of human nature. They are always getting wrong
the cold actual facts as to what particular people mean--what they are
like, and capable of being like and are soon going to show they are like.