h hardihood and with joy the feat of weaving into business several
strands of value at once, making things and making money and making men
together, the Trust will become a vast machine of human happiness,
lifting up and pulling on the world for all of us day and night.

If our labouring men to-day are to be got out from under the machines,
we can only bring it to pass by doing everything we can in directors'
meetings or in labor unions or as buyers or as journalists--whatever we
may be--to keep the trust-machines in this world out of the hands of the
tired, weak, and mechanical-minded men.

And the things that have been happening to the trust-machines, or are
about to happen to them, have happened and are beginning to happen
before our eyes to the machines themselves. The machines of flame and
iron wheels and men in monstrous factories which the philosophers and
the poets and the very preachers have doomed our world with are passing
through the same evolution as the trust-machines, and shall be seen at
last through the dim struggle yielding themselves, bending their iron
wills to the same indomitable human spirit, the same slow, stern,
implacable will of the soul of man. They shall be inspired machines.

Now for a long time we have seen (for the most part) the weak and
mechanical-minded employer, the man who takes the line of least
resistance in business, on every hand about us, making his employees
mechanical-minded. The men have not been able to work without machines
to work with, and as they have been obliged to come to him to get the
machines, he has adopted the policy of letting himself fall into the
weakest and easiest way of keeping his men under his own control. He
takes the machines the men have come to him to get, and turns them back
against them, points them at their lives, stops their minds with them,
their intelligence and manhood, the very hope and religion with which
they live; and of course, when men have had machines pointed at them
long enough, one sees them on every hand being mowed down in rows into
machines themselves--as deadly and as hopeless to make a civilization
out of, or a nation out of, or to give votes to, or to have for fathers
as machines would be, as iron or leather or wood.

In the meantime, however, we seem to have been developing--partly by
competition and partly by combination and by experience--employers who
are not mechanical-minded, who have spirit themselves, and who believe