d in the world, because the moment the Firm finds that a man's skill
has reached the uttermost point in his work, where it would be to the
Firm's immediate interests to keep him and where the Firm could keep on
making money out of him and where the man could not keep on growing,
they have a way of stepping up to such a man (and such things happen
every few days), and telling him that he ought to go elsewhere, finding
him a better place and sending him to it. This is a regular system and
highly organized. The factory is known or looked upon as a big family or
school. There are hundreds of young men and young women who, in order to
get in and get started, and merely be on the premises of such a factory,
would offer to work for the firm for nothing. The Factory, to them, is
like a great Gate on the World.

It is its ideals that have made the factory a great gate on the World.

And ideals are news. Ideals are news to a man about himself. News to a
man about himself and about what he can be, is gospel.

And a factory with men at the top who have the brains about human nature
to do things like this, men who can tell people news about themselves,
all day, every day, all the week, like a church--let such a factory, I
say, for one, have a steeple with chimes in it, if it wants to, and be
counted with the other churches!

People have a fashion of speaking of a man's ideals in a kind of weak,
pale way, as if ideals were clouds, done in water-colour by schoolgirls,
as if they were pretty, innocent things, instead of being fierce,
splendid, terrific energies, victorious, irrevocable in human history,
trampling the earth like unicorns, breathing wonder, deaths, births upon
the world, carrying everything before them, everywhere they go. These
are ideals! This may not be the way ideals work in a moment or in a
year, but it is the way they work in history, and it is the way they
make a man feel when he is working on them. It is what they are for, to
make him feel like this, when he is working on them. With the men who
are most alive and who live the longest, the men who live farther ahead
and think in longer periods of time, the energies in ideals function as
an everyday matter of course.

I wish people would speak oftener of a man's motives, what he lives for,
as his motive powers. They generally speak of motives in a man as if
they were a mere kind of dead chart or spiritual geography in him, or
clock-hand on him or map of his sou