in the daily press, and
through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory
rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their
thoughts to higher things.

A great many wise things have been said to Labour--masterpieces, miles
of them as it were, whole Louvres of words have been hung upon their
walls.

But in vain!

And all because we have merely taken the outside of the boy's head in
our hands. We have not thought what was really going on in it. We have
not tried to steer it inside. We have been superficial.

It is superficial for a comfortable man with a bun in his pocket to talk
to a starving man about having some higher motive than getting something
to eat. Everybody sees that this is superficial, if we mean by it that
his body is starving. But if we mean something more real and more
terrible than that--that he is starving inside, that his soul is
starving, that he has nothing to live for, no real object in getting
something to eat--if we mean by it, in other words, that the man's
imagination is not touched even by his own life, people take it very
lightly.

And it is the most important thing in the world. The one thing now
necessary to society, to industry, is to get hold of the men who are in
it, one by one, and touch their imaginations about themselves. We have
millions of men working without their thoughts and expectations being
ventilated or passed along, year after year.

One sees these men everywhere one goes, in thousands of factories, doing
their work without any draught. We already have tall chimneys for our
coal furnaces; we have next to see the value of tall chimneys, great
flues to the sky, on the lives and thought and the inner energies of
men. The most obvious way to get a draught on a man, to get him to glow
up and work is to cut through an opening in the top of his life.

Just where to cut this opening, and just how to cut it in each man's
life--each man considered as a problem by himself--is the Labour
problem.

There are certain general principles that might be put down in passing.
To begin with, we must not feel ashamed to begin implacably with the
actual man just as he is, and with the wants and the motives that he
actually has. We should feel ashamed rather to begin in any other way.
It would not be bright or thoughtful to begin on him with motives he is
going to have; and it certainly would not be religious or worthy of us
to try to make him begi