drygoods store with fifteen.

This problem has been essentially and in principle solved. At least we
know it is about to be solved. We are ready to admit--most of us--that
it is practicable for a department store to be human. Everything the man
at the top does expresses his human nature and his personality to his
clerks. His clerks become twenty-five hundred more of him in miniature.
What is more, the very stuff in which the clerks in department stores
work--the thing that passes through their hands, is human, and
everything about it is human, or can be made human; and all the while
vast currents of human beings, huge Mississippis of human feeling, flow
past the clerks--thousands and thousands of souls a day, and pour over
their souls, making them and keeping them human. The stream clears
itself.

But what can we say about human beings in a mine, about the
practicability of keeping human twenty-five hundred men in a hole in the
ground? And how can a mine-owner reach down to the men in the hole, make
himself felt as a human being on the bottom floor of the hole in the
ground?

In a department store the employer expresses himself to his clerks
through every one of the other twenty-five hundred; they mingle and stir
their souls and hopes and fears together, and he expresses himself to
all of them through them all.

But in a mine, two men work all alone down in the dark hole in the
ground. Thousands of other men, all in dark holes, are near by, with
nothing but the dull sound of picks to come between. In thousands of
other holes men work, each with his helper, all alone. The utmost the
helper can do is to grow like the man he works with, or like his own
pick, or like the coal he chips out, or like the black hole. The utmost
the man who mines coal can do, in the way of being human, is with his
helper.

In a factory, for the most part, the only way, during working hours, an
employer can express himself and his humanness to his workman is through
the steel machine he works with--through its being a new, good, fair
machine or a poor one. He can only smile and frown at him with steel, be
good to him in wheels and levers, or now and then perhaps through a
foreman pacing down the aisles.

The question the modern business man in a factory has to face is very
largely this: "I have acres of machines all roaring my will at my men. I
have leather belts, printed rules, white steam, pistons, roar, air,
water and fire and silence