to express myself to my workmen in. I have
long monotonous swings and sweeps of cold steel, buckets of melted iron,
strips of wood, bells, whistles, clocks--to express myself, to express
my human spirit to my men. Is there, or is there not, any possible way
in which my factory with its machines can be made as human and as
expressive of the human as a department store?"

This is the question that our machine civilization has set itself to
answer.

All the men with good honest working imaginations, the geniuses and the
freemen of the world, are setting themselves the task of answering it.

Some say, "Machines are on the necks of the men. We will take the
machines away."

Others say, "We will make our men as good as our machines. We will make
our inventions in men catch up with our inventions in machines."

We naturally turn to the employer first as having the first chance. What
is there an employer can do to draw out the latent force in the men,
evoke the divine, incalculable passion sleeping beneath in the
machine-walled minds, the padlocked wills, the dull unmined desires of
men? How can he touch and wake the solar plexus of labour?

If any employer desires to get into the inner substance of the most
common type of workman, be an artist with him, express himself with him
and change the nature of that substance, give it a different colour or
light or movement so that he will work three times as fast, ten times as
cheerfully and healthfully, and with his whole body and soul, spirit,
and how is he going to do it?

Most employers wish they could do this. If they could persuade their men
to believe in them, to begin to be willing to work with them instead of
against them, they would do it.

What form of language is there, whether of words or of actions, that an
employer can use to make the men who work nine hours a day for him and
to whom he has to express himself across acres of machines, believe in
him and understand him?

The modern employer finds himself set sternly face to face, every day of
his life, with this question. All civilization seems crowding up day by
day, seems standing outside his office door as he goes in and as he goes
out, and asking him--now with despair, now with a kind of grim,
implacable hope, "Do you believe, or do you not believe, a factory can
be made as human as a department store?"

This question is going to be answered first by men who know what iron
machines really are, and what th