is a question of
supplying a nation with ideals. It is a problem which only an American
National Ideal Supply Company could hope to handle. The very first
moment three or four purple hats with blue feathers for millionaires and
for labourers have been found and set up in the great show window of the
world, the industrial unrest of this century begins to end.

* * * * *

As I went by, one day not long ago, I saw two small boys playing
house--marking off rooms--sitting-rooms and bedrooms, with rows of
stones on the ground. When I came up they had just taken hold of a big
stone they wanted to lift over into line a little. They were tugging on
it hopefully and with very red faces, and it did not budge. I picked up
a small beam about five feet long on my side of the road, that I thought
would do for a crowbar, stepped over to the boys, fixed a fulcrum for
them, and went on with my walk. When I came back after my walk that
night to the place where the boys had been playing, I found the boys had
given up working on their house. And as I looked about, every big stone
for yards around--every one that was the right size--seemed subtly out
of place. The top of the stone wall, too, was very crooked.

They had given up playing house and had played crowbar all day instead.

I should think it would have been a rather wonderful day, those boys'
first day, seven or eight hours of it spent, with just a little time off
for luncheon, in seeing how a crowbar worked!

I have forgotten just how much larger part of a ton one inch more on a
crowbar lifts. I never know figures very well. But I know people and I
know that a man with only three day's worth of things ahead to live for
does not get one hundredth part of the purchase power on what he is
doing that the man gets who works with thirty days ahead of things to
live for, all of them nerving him up, keeping him in training, and
inspiring him. And I know that the man who does his work with a longer
lever still, with thirty or forty years worth' of things he wants, all
crowding in upon him and backing him up, can lift things so easily, so
even jauntily, sometimes, that he seems to many of us sometimes to be a
new size and a new kind of man.

* * * * *

The general conventional idea of business is, that if you give a man
more wages to work for, he will work more, but of course if a business
man has the brains, knows how to f