f I were a nation, the first question I would ask would be, "Why bother
with wheelbarrows, and with being obliged in this melodramatic Russian
way to act an idea all out in order to see it?"

In America we propose to come through to this same idea by being human,
by using our brains on our fellow human beings, by hoeing each other's
imaginations.

The issue on which our brains have got to be used is one which grows
logically out of the two main new characteristic elements in our modern
industrial life.

These are the Mahogany Desk and the Cog.

III

WHAT THE MAHOGANY DESK IS GOING TO DO

The old employer in the days before machinery came in used to hoe in the
next row with his employee.

The next problem of industrial democracy consists in making a man at a
mahogany desk with nothing on it, look to a laborer as if he were hoeing
alongside him in the next row.

To get the laborer to understand and do team work a man must find some
way of visualizing, or making an honest impressive moving picture of what
he does at his desk.

A polished mahogany desk with nothing on it does not look very laborious
to a laboring man.

In order to have democracy in business successful, what an employer has
to do is to find a substitute for hoeing in the next row.

His workman wants to keep his eye on him, watch him hoeing faster than he
is and see the perspiration on his brow.

The problem of the employer in other words to-day, is how to make his
mahogany desk sweat. It really does for all practical purposes of course,
but how can he make it look so?

In the book a hundred million people would write if they had time, the
first ten chapters should be devoted to searching out and inventing in
behalf of employers and setting in action in behalf of employers, on a
massive and national scale, ways in which employers can dramatize to
workmen the way they work.

Very soon now, everywhere--much harder than hoeing in the next row--with
the sweat rolling off their brows, employers will sit at their desks
hoeing their workmen's imaginations.

The other main point in the book the hundred million people would write
if they could, would be the precise opposite of this one. I would devote
the second ten chapters I think, not to Mahogany Desks, or to the buttons
on them directing machines, but to Cogs.

The second great point the hundred million people will have to meet and
will have to see a way out for in their book, is the w