The cure for the American laboring man's under-production and working merely for money is to get the American laboring man to believe that the American employer is working for something besides money--that he is earning all he gets, that he is working to do a good job--the way he is saying the laboring man ought to do. If the American laboring man can be got to believe this about his employer, we will soon see the strike and the lock-out and the Fifty-Cent Dollar and the economic panic of the world all going out together. I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports--men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like. If all employers and all employees knew these men and knew what their laborers thought of them and how their laborers get on with them the face of Labor toward Capital--the face of this country toward the world and toward itself and toward every man in it would be changed in a week. Suppose I propose to take one of these men and write about him until everybody knows about him, and to devote the rest of my life to seeing that everybody knows these men, and start to do it to-morrow; what would be the first thing I would come upon? The first thing I would come upon would be a convention. It is one of the automatic ideas or conventions of business men--not to believe in themselves. XVI THE BUSINESS MAN, THE PROFESSIONAL MAN, AND THE ARTIST Why is it that if a professional man or an artist does or says a certain thing--people believe him and that if a business man does or says precisely the same thing--most business men are suspicious? When I say in the first sentence of an article on the front page of the _Saturday Evening Post_--as I did awhile ago--"I would pay people to read what I am saying on this page,"--everybody believes me. As people read on in one of my articles in the _Post_, they cannot be kept from seeing how egregiously I am enjoying my work. Anybody can see it--that I would pay up to the limit all the money I can get hold of--my own, or anybody's--to get other people to enjoy reading my stuff as much as I do. Nobody seems inclined to deny that if I could afford to--or, if I had to--I would pay ten cents a word to practically any man, to get him to read what I write.