nature,
and knew enough about psychology to found a great business house and
wanted to make my employee good, or make him work three times as hard
for me, with three times the normal strength, day by day, and have a
normal old age to look forward to, I do not think I would wait for the
House of Commons to butt in and pension him. It seems to me that I would
be in a position to do it more adequately, more rapidly, and do it with
more intimate knowledge of economy than the House of Commons could. And
I would not have to convince several hundred men, men from rural
counties, how I could improve my factory and get them to let me improve
it. I could do it quietly by myself.

In any given industrial difficulty, there is and must be a vision for
every man, a vision either borrowed for him or made for him by some one
else, or a vision he has made for himself, that fits in just where he
is. In the last analysis our industrial success is going to lie in the
sense of Here, and Me, and Now, raised to the n-th power, in what might
be called a kind of larger syndicalism.

The typical syndicalist, instead of saying, as he does to-day, "We will
take the factories out of our employers hands and run them ourselves,"
is going to say, "We will make ourselves fit to run the factories
ourselves."

What would please the employers more, give them a general, or national
confidence in trying to run business and improve the conditions of work
to-day, than to have their employees, suddenly, all over the nation,
begin doing their work so well that they would be fit to run the
factories?

What is true of employers and employees in factories is still more true
of the employers and employees in the great retail stores. If there is
one thing rather than another the business men and women on Oxford
Street, the managers, floor walkers and clerks all up and down the
street are really engaged in all day all their lives, it is what might
be called a daily nine-hour drill in understanding people. Why should
employers and employees like these--experts in human nature--men who
make their profession a success by studying human nature, and by working
in it daily, call in a few drifting gentlemen from the House of Commons
and expect them to work out their human problems better than they can do
it?

Employers and clerks in retail stores are the two sets of people in all
the world most competent to study together the working details of human
nature, to act