oes to bed he is not merely saving the
Company's electricity but his own. He knows that he is reducing his own
and everybody's price for electricity, and not merely increasing the
profits of the Company.

It makes another kind of man slowly out of thousands of men every day,
every night, turning on and turning off their lights.

The Electric Light Company has come to have a daily, an almost hourly,
influence on the way men do business and go about their work in that
city--the motives and assumptions with which they bargain with one
another--that might be envied by twenty churches.

All that had happened was that a man with a powerful, quietly wilful
personality--the kind that went on crusades and took cities in other
ages--had appeared at last, and proposed to do the same sort of thing in
business. He proposed to express his soul, just as it was, in business
the way other people had expressed theirs for a few hundred years in
poetry or more easy and conventional ways.

If he could not have made the electric light business say the things
about people and about himself that he liked and that he believed, he
would have had to make some other business say them.

One of the things he had most wanted to say and prove in business was
the economic value of being human, the enormous business saving that
could be effected by being believed in.

He preferred being believed in himself, in business, and he knew other
people would prefer it; and he was sure that if, as people said, "being
believed in did not pay," it must be because ways of inventing faith in
people, the technique of trust, had not been invented.

He found himself invited to take charge of the Electric Light Company at
a time when it was insolvent and in disgrace with the people, and he
took the Corporation in hand on the specific understanding that he
should be allowed to put his soul into it, that he should be allowed his
own way for three years--in believing in people, and in inventing ways
of getting believed in as much as he liked.

The last time I saw him, though he is old and nearly blind, and while as
he talked there lay a darkness on his eyes, there was a great light in
his face.

He had besieged a city with the shrewdness of his faith, and conquered a
hundred thousand men by believing in them more than they could.

By believing in them shrewdly, and by thinking out ways of expressing
that belief, he had invented a Corporation--a Public Service
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