ews to
people about what they want to buy and about how they are to spend their
money--very personal, intimate news to every man--soon rises to be Head
of the Head of the factory and of the entire business.

It will probably be the same in a cabinet or in a government. If the
Secretary of the Department of Commerce has a news engineer as a
subordinate in his department and begins to study and observe how to do
his work best, how to solve his problem in the nation, we will soon see
the head of the department, if he really is the head of the department,
quietly taking over his news engineer's job and letting his news
engineer have his.

It is a news engineering job, being a Secretary of Commerce.

Every member of the Cabinet has a news engineering job.

And the fact seems to be that the moment the news is attended to in each
member's department--applied news, special and private news, turned on
and set to work where it is called for--most members of cabinets,
secretaries of making people do things, and for that matter, the
Presidents of making people do things will be thrown out of employment.
The Secretaries of What People Think, and the President of What People
Think--the engineers of the news in this nation--will be the men who
govern it.

CHAPTER XV

NEWS-CROWDS

I have tried to express in the last chapter, some kind of tentative
working vision or hope of what authors and of what newspaper men can do
in governing a country.

This chapter is for anybody, any plain human being.

Governments all over the world to-day are groping to find out what plain
human beings are like.

It does not matter very long what other things a government gets wrong,
if it gets the people right.

This suggests something that each of us can do.

I was calling on ----, Treasurer of ----, in his new bank, not long
ago--a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on
this wicked world--a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from
above. It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money.

"This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built it?"

---- mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of
him.

I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the bank. He said
he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set
against it.

And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they
were. They kept offering a good many rather vague obje